Contact centres have for long seemed to have a bad reputation; people have dreaded them, while organisations themselves have tended to see them as a strain on their resources. However, advances in technology aren’t only empowering businesses to deliver better, more personalised services that customers are demanding, but it is now also enabling them to turn their contact centres from cost centres to value centres.
Historically, call centres seemed like faceless organisations, process-driven and lacking any personalisation, but changing consumer behaviour requires that organisations respond accordingly. In fact, studies now show that the vast majority of customers view the experience a company provides to be as important as its products or services. Customers in the digital age want personalised service from brands, with the ability to initiate and continue conversations across multiple channels and not have to repeat themselves at each step.
Rather than seeing this as yet another cost, businesses have come to the realisation that what they had seen traditionally as a cost of doing business is actually an opportunity to provide a seamless experience for customers and create memorable moments in a customer journey, help reduce churn, and generate trust and loyalty with customers. This has gained importance during the current tough economic climate, where it has become essential to focus on customer retention, especially when cheaper alternatives from competitors might become an attractive option to the customer.
Prioritising employee experience
Much has been said about using technology to improve customer experience and it remains a popular talking point in the industry. However, it is time that businesses place just as much importance on employee experience: by prioritising the experience of the contact centre agent, a customer’s experience will ultimately be better.
After all, it is the contact centre agents who play the pivotal role in generating business value by retaining customers and carrying out cross-selling opportunities. “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients,” renowned British entrepreneur Richard Branson has been quoted as saying, and it rings true here.
So how can modern contact centre software improve the employee experience for agents? Firstly, being an agent should not be akin to being part of a tribe in Survivor, stuck on an island. Agents in contact centres should have visibility into the back office and enjoy ease of communication with business partners. This includes instant messaging support between agents, the ability to seamlessly transfer calls and to be integrated with back office staff who use other popular communications platforms, such as Microsoft Teams.
When it comes to the actual customer engagements, the technology and tools used need to be able to provide the agent with the context needed by integrating with business systems – who is calling, emailing or chatting, as well as history of previous engagements and outcomes. Through right channelling, agents can meet the customer where they are, before ushering them to the most appropriate channel based on the nature of the engagement. For example, a customer could initiate a conversation on WhatsApp, but if personal data needs to be shared, or consent given, this needs to be done through a channel that meets with compliance requirements. All of this enables the agent to offer a great, personalised customer interaction.
In addition, presenting the agent with a view of the customer’s journey, such as a prior engagement with a chatbot before ending up with a human agent, enables them to pick up where technology could not successfully resolve an issue.
Distributed contact centre
Beyond the agent experience, modern omni channel platforms also provide contact centre operators with the flexibility that they require. With hybrid working on the increase, a recent survey found that 87% of IT decision makers foresee rising adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure in the next 3-5 years. For the contact centre industry, these services enable fast and easy access to the agents’ applications regardless of location.
These hybrid work environments, if offered, need to be properly designed so that the agent’s experience of working remotely is secure, and that they have full access to required applications, and don’t have to keep switching between multiple applications. At Telviva for example, we are deploying Telviva Omni into Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix environments to allow for remote desktop access; traditional call centre applications on the other hand don’t have the web engines and necessary technologies to enable such experiences.
Beyond simply enabling remote working, this has also given rise to the concept of the Distributed Contact Centre – always being available, with customer service agents able to assist no matter the environmental conditions (or lockdowns, load shedding or civic unrest) – having a distributed model means that the businesses’ customers are always serviced.
Is your business looking for a synchronised, intelligent, user-friendly contact centre platform that enables agents and customer service personnel to transform customer engagement into a stellar experience? Contact us today.
By Kelvin Brown, Director at AnD Communications, a Telviva subsidiary.
