With “customer experience” as the primary buzzword for 2020 and beyond, it only makes sense that contact centres would be a crucial consideration for businesses of all sizes. If you want to connect with your clients on a deeper level, create dedicated advocates, and overcome everyday efficiency problems, then you need to be ready to enhance your contact centre.
The question for many enterprises, is how and where should they be moving forward in 2020?
Today, we’re going to be looking at some of the top tips that businesses can use to transform their old-fashioned contact centre into a hub of customer satisfaction.
1. Migrate to the Cloud
It almost seems bizarre to mention it at this point, but the cloud needs to become the default choice in the years ahead – even for larger enterprise companies. The flexibility of the cloud model will allow you to rent bundles of software and equipment according to your company’s needs and stay competitive without spending a fortune.
What’s more, migration to the cloud allows you to take advantage of a far more comprehensive contact centre, where you can eliminate the voice, chat, and email divide, and focus on giving your agents a complete view of the customer journey from start to finish. With cloud technology, you can implement everything from artificial intelligence, to omni-channel routing without having to worry about overspending on hardware. Check out our CCaaS Smart Guide.
2. Focus on Analytics
There are a wide range of ways that businesses in the current landscape can evolve and grow. However, simply investing in every new technology as it appears is rarely the right route. Instead, you need to use analytics to determine exactly how you should evolve. Analytics can allow you to examine exactly what’s going on in your business, with information on how many agents you need at different times of the day, and what kind of conversations are the most successful.
Additionally, 2020 is rapidly emerging as the year when Natural Language Processing could go mainstream in contact centres. This tool allows us to get unprecedented insights into the customer journey, offering everything from sentiment analysis, to predictive insights. If you really want to delight your customer, you need these immersive analytics.
3. Concentrate on Agent Upskilling
With so much new technology coming into the contact centre landscape, it’s going to be more important than ever for agents to get the training they need to thrive. Artificial intelligence and bots are becoming a common feature in the contact centre, which means that the role of the agent is becoming a lot more complex and focused on problem-solving.
It’s imperative that agents are properly trained to deal with in-depth issues, so that they can properly support the customers that aren’t able to help themselves with FAQs and step-by-step tutorials. The human beings in a contact centre will need to become an army of specialists, capable of handling problems that don’t necessarily have a “quick fix”.
4. Transform the Workplace
Speaking of the rise of a new kind of contact centre agent, we’re beginning to see that today’s agents don’t necessarily need to be located in a specific office to be successful. The contact centre doesn’t have to be a huge crowded space packed with people hunched over cubicles anymore. A combination of factors is beginning to push more companies towards the idea of remote working.
If you can successfully make the migration into the cloud, then embracing a remote contact centre should be a lot easier. Staff shortages could become less frequent as employees can pick up their laptops and work from home at a moment’s notice. What’s more, you’ll be able to ensure that you have people available to take calls from your customers at virtually any time of the day.
5. Get to Know Customer Expectations
Finally, if you really want to take your contact centre to the next level, then you need to understand the context behind every conversation with a customer. Analytics will give you an insight into what your audience members need, but you’ll need to turn the information that you get into actionable strategies that deliver a better end experience.
For instance, when the context of each interaction is understood, it’s much easier to put optimised routing strategies in place. Remember that today’s customers expect the agent they converse with to have prior knowledge of their previous discussions, even if they were interacting with a bot on your website before calling you.
Are You Ready for the Future of Contact Centres?
The contact centre as we know it is constantly changing. It’s not just a place to deal with repetitive calls anymore. Increasingly, in the current situation, contact centres are becoming critical touchpoints between brands and their customers, designed to deliver unforgettable and meaningful interactions.
The question is, are you ready?
