Modern Contact Center Solutions for Evolving Customer Needs

Modern contact centers require innovative solutions to cater to dynamic customer needs. As customers today have come to prefer communicating over an extensive range of channels such as social media, email, chat, etc., contact centers ought to move away from isolated and ineffective software tools to meet and exceed their expectations.

Equipping your contact center with customer-centric capabilities can set the stage for the delivery of a frictionless digital customer experience. In order to streamline support and deliver personalized customer experiences, a well-integrated contact center is a must.

Let’s explore some of the solutions that can make it happen.

1. Unified Agent Desktop

The Contact Center Agent Desktop acts as a vital link between your CRM and contact center software. By fetching customer details from the CRM, it equips agents with a 360-degree view of the customer interaction journey, thereby ensuring that agents are well-equipped with information to handle customer queries effectively. Full visibility of tickets, cases, and interaction history also enable speedy prioritization of tasks for agents.

Benefits of a Unified Agent Desktop include:

⦿ Shorter call times: With the unification of multiple applications onto a single interface, agents need not spend time navigating a large number of applications. This reduces their response time and also contributes to boosting the customer experience.

⦿ Better Agent Productivity: Agents do not have to deal with the hassle of switching back and forth between applications while handling a call simultaneously. They can quickly access all the customer information on the unified interface before them.

⦿ Personalized customer experiences: Cutting down on agents’ tasks of manually hunting for information allows them the scope to focus their attention on listening closely to customers. Also, by equipping agents with real-time, personalized, and contextually relevant intelligence, it enables the delivery of a frictionless customer experience.

⦿ Reduced costs: The unified interface eliminates the need for contact centers to invest in additional hardware and software solutions. Also, the training costs for agents are significantly lower than what would be needed if agents had to interact with multiple systems.

⦿ Automated workflows: Automating routine tasks such as call handling, call routing, wrap-up, or even data entry tasks significantly brings down the manual effort required by agents. This simplification of workflows improves efficiency, reduces errors, and also frees up agents to focus on more strategically complex tasks.

2. CTI Connectors

A Computer Telephony Integration allows coordination between your computer and the telephonic system. It enables contact center agents to make and receive voice calls directly from the computer interface, eliminating the need for a physical desk phone.

A CTI connector comes equipped with the following key features:

⦿ Advanced call controls: Centralized computer dashboards allow agents to manage calls easily. Call controls include answer, hold, transfer, retrieve, conference, consult, etc. Using the integrated solution, agents are saved the effort of switching from phone to computer.

⦿ Automated Screen Pop: Key customer information such as name, contact information, and interaction history is displayed on the unified agent interface. This allows agents to respond quickly and effectively to customers’ incoming calls.

⦿ Automated Dialing: Agents are saved from the effort of manually dialing the numbers to reach out to a customer. Automating outgoing calls enables the agents to reach out to a large number of prospects, enhance business and send out bulk announcements whenever needed.

⦿ Call Monitoring: CTI allows live call monitoring that enables supervisors to help agents in resolving disputes in real-time, evaluate agent performance, and train new agents better. By listening to conversations in real-time, supervisors can gain insights into their shortcomings and also lend a helping hand to them as and when needed.

3. Supervisor Desktop

For supervisors to perform efficiently, they need to have access to actionable intelligence that allows them to take the next best action. Supervisors should be able to monitor calls made or received by their agents, ensure call standards are being maintained, check for training issues, and discover and highlight the best practices. A unified Supervisor Desktop ensures all this and much more from a single interface.

By unifying all actions into a single interface, it becomes easier for supervisors to manage teams and coach agents easily. With a minimal number of clicks, supervisors can gain a holistic view of how their team is performing as a whole and how each agent is doing when compared to their peers. By monitoring calls in real-time, they can ‘barge in’ to assist agents if they face difficulty.

Similarly, they can relieve pressure on agents during busy hours by intercepting and handling inbound calls themselves. Furthermore, having access to all the recorded calls allows them to research training points and review the aspects of an agent’s role.

4. Reporting Plus

Analyzing business KPIs is crucial to understand if contact centers are able to achieve their strategic goals or not. However, most organizations miss out on this critical step of effectively analyzing business data due to redundant technologies.

In traditional contact centers, the presence of disparate data sources and multiple tools for data collection require agents to hop from one tool to another – each with a separate login to gather business insights. With the inability to consolidate reports from multiple tools, agents find it challenging to gain a 360 view of the data.

Features of Reporting Plus:

⦿ Unified reports across all the systems
⦿ Effortless merging of reports from CRM, telephony, and other sources
⦿ Dynamic date filters to automatically schedule reports (hourly, weekly, monthly, and yearly)
⦿ Smarter reporting actions such as Schedule Reports, Create Groups, and more

5. Agent Scripting

Agent scripts are a set of predefined step-by-step questions that you can ask your customers to be able to resolve the issue in a structured and optimized manner. Since personalized customer service is the key to contact center success. While using agent scripts, it is imperative to have humanized conversations without making your agents sound robotic. How do you ensure this balance?

An agent scripting tool is the answer. A guided software, created with a logical flow of conversation, helps create a remarkable customer experience for your customers. The NovelVox dynamic Agent Scripting Tool is easy to customize and can be updated anytime, thanks to the drag-and-drop designer studio.

The tool helps bring down average call handling time by initiating meaningful conversations with customers while also reducing the after-call efforts and eliminating data duplication with an integration-friendly interface. Without the need to invest extra hours into agent training, it educates agents and makes them efficient enough to handle situations even without a script. Added to this is the increased chances of cross-selling and upselling with reduced customer frustration due to faster response times and relevant responses.

6. Visual IVR

With the traditional IVR, customers were required to navigate through multiple options and repeat the same queries in front of agents that they had fed into the IVR system. Customers today find clicking on a website much easier than the cumbersome process involved in the former.

Providing a visually-guided menu interface allows customers to touch their way from the menu to the solution in a matter of few clicks, and all this from the comfort of their smartphone screens or webpage. Furthermore, the visual IVR system can automatically assist, direct or redirect conversations based on the user reactions.

By doing away with the traditional switchboard operator, the visual IVR system provides a single point of contact for each customer’s call and also enables users to navigate an automated call routing system, thereby saving agents time and effort in manually connecting and routing incoming calls.

7. Case Management

Inefficient processes can deprive agents of the rich contextual details they need to resolve customer queries faster. How can you ensure that agents have all the information they need to manage, prioritize and resolve cases in an efficient and timely manner?

Leveraging a modern Case Management System is the answer to this.

A Case Management System is designed to collect details related to customer issues and concerns so they can be addressed quickly and efficiently. Apart from collecting customer information, it additionally provides businesses with detailed analytics and business insights about customer support requests.

The tool can aid agents in developing an efficient customer service strategy by tracking, allocating, and resolving tickets faster. It allows agents to view the entire customer journey, from previous interactions to purchase history, thus equipping them with a better understanding of their customers.

The automated system also helps agents in navigating the cases faster and automatically categorizes interactions for efficient resolutions. Furthermore, the single-view interface eliminates the need for agents to switch tabs, creating an opportunity to serve customers in a quick and personalized manner.

8. CRM integrations

Contact centers are overwhelmed with huge amounts of customer data. When dealing with customers, it’s humanly impossible for agents to remember each and every customer. With a loosely integrated system, these customer details might be lost or forgotten, and agents would be compelled to communicate based on guesswork rather than bringing hard, established facts about their customers into the conversation.

Integrating Your Contact Center with a CRM ensures the automatic passing of data to each of your applications and that the people and processes using these systems work better. The integration provides companies with a central space to store customer data, track interactions, and enable a seamless flow of information, thereby enabling businesses to manage customers in an efficient manner.

Integrated CRM helps in freeing agents from doing unproductive work such as updating caller information, accessing interaction data, etc., and allows them to invest their time in targeting leads and driving conversions. Analyzing the data collected by CRM can help agents understand the latent demand, future requirements, and cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Wrap up

To overcome the productivity challenge for agents in contact centers, it is important to use the right tools and technologies that facilitate personalized customer interactions while reducing agent workload. Using unified contact center solutions can help overcome the many contact center barriers due to siloed applications and ensure a seamless flow of information that helps elevate customer experience and rationalize revenue streams.