It’s no secret that quality customer interactions are the foundation of customer experience and investing in customer experience technologies is a priority for companies to win, support, and retain customers.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, businesses in all sectors face the challenge of adapting their strategy to stay competitive, and adjusting their infrastructures to meet customer expectations, to stay agile and flexible and to become more cost efficient.
So how can businesses reap the rewards and achieve the most out of an investment in cloud contact center technology?
First, it’s important to have the right cloud call center software in place. There are several cloud deployment models including hosted and private cloud, but for the most benefit, companies should look at a cloud software provider that provides secure, open cloud platform. An enterprise-grade, open cloud platform can deploy quickly, scale securely, and offers extensive developer tools, third-party integrations and a network of ecosystem partners. You’ll be looking for a vendor that can provide this as well as who can help you optimize your cloud contact center in these five ways.
Deliver omnichannel experiences
Customers expect to have an easy and seamless experience when they interact with a company, no matter the preferred channel. They rely on agents to be prescriptive and proactive, and understand what they need help with from the thread of their omnichannel journeys and previous interactions. Research from our NICE CXone survey found that 72% agreed that they’d "expect to be able to continue talking with the same representative on the phone as I was talking with via online chat." For example, when a customer has already chatted with an online agent and is then redirected to a phone conversation, the agent should still have access to the chat conversation thread to continue the interaction without interruption.
Cloud contact center software can provide companies with a full picture of individual customer journeys, allowing them to deliver a fully integrated customer experience, which is contextual, timely and relevant.
Optimize the workforce
Companies are working smarter and faster while constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency by reducing waste and increasing productivity. Optimization of the workforce is about people, processes and performance, along with the technology that connects human behaviors with operational metrics.
For the best results, look for a cloud contact center solution with in-built workforce optimization. For contact centers, this generally means interaction recording, live monitoring, quality management and coaching, analytics, workforce management, or a combination of these activities.
Measure performance
Setting appropriate goals is a great way of identifying opportunities for improvement. A cloud contact center solution can pull in data from different systems with a performance dashboard that is updated automatically and can be set up for individual agent, workgroup and executive views. With all the data in one place, managers have a clear focus on goals and key metrics to allow for regular adjustments as inconsistencies in performance come to light.
Identify key topic areas
Speech and desktop analytics dramatically improves a contact center’s ability to uncover insights, identify key issues and complaints, prevent high-impact incidents and handle customer interactions more effectively and efficiently. Managers get visual reports and then are able to drill down and listen to the most critical calls being recorded and quickly get more details for the most relevant issues at the time (i.e. “called before”, “second time calling”, “issues with billing process”, etc). Cloud analytics as part of cloud contact center software allows managers to search for specific key words, terms or phrases, then create a report showing the trends in the contact center. This process makes it easier to identify problems based on direct customer feedback. Having this deeper level of insight can help you be prepared with better training and coaching for contact center agents that reflects the most up to date information from customers about the experience you are providing.
Focus on quality management
According to Aberdeen Group, a research firm that identifies Best-in-Class organizations, top performers focus on quality. With a complete cloud solution that includes built-in workforce optimization and analytics, companies have many tools at their fingertips to monitor and improve quality on a consistent and regular basis. This starts with having service-level agreements in place for speed-to-answer, first call resolution, customer satisfaction, customer retention and attrition, and more. Cloud contact center software can improve these metrics with greater visibility across the organization, sophisticated routing to get customers to the right agent as quickly as possible and with built-in quality reporting and agent feedback coaching and performance management. In many industries, this also includes compliance with the need to systematically monitor and take corrective actions to ensure all agents and interactions comply with regulations such as privacy and protection against fraudulent activity.
When you couple the closing technology gap with the important of customer experience — it becomes even more important to stay ahead of the competition and ensure companies are getting the most out of cloud investments.
Read this article in entirety at ContactCentres.com.
