The growth curve for voice-only contact centres will increasingly plateau as customers spread across more digital channels and expect their favourite brands to do the same. A fully functional omni-channel contact centre, unlike a call centre, will have a judicious channel mix, employ cross-channel agents, and use channel-blending-friendly technologies.
Let us map this transformation journey and the benefits it entails.
Transforming Your Call Centre: 4 Milestones
Initially, your call centre will focus on providing necessary support and responsiveness at optimal costs. The goal is to achieve service and cost-efficiency so that the customer feels satisfied. Relationships at this stage are mostly transactional, powered by voice as it is accessible to the widest cross-section of customers.
Once you have an operational call centre that is profitable, you should extend into email as the second-most popular channel. Customers across demographics want to switch between call and email seamlessly, so this is a good investment. At this stage, you can start to train agents in channel blending.
Here on, you can gradually add more channels to the mix including live chat, social media, intelligent automated assistance, and wearable apps. The goal is to build customer loyalty and stay connected over multiple channels, and interactions are more about engagement than transactional in nature.
In the final stage of transformation, you would aim to achieve a true omni-channel presence, where there is data continuity across channels to deliver a consistent and coherent customer journey. The goal is to provide a differentiated CX to convert customers into brand advocates, informed about your products, and able to add others to the funnel through social referrals.
Throughout this transformation, you are transitioning from a traditional call centre to a full-fledged experience hub.
Call Centre vs Contact Centres: Key Differences
- Call centres are, by definition, voice-only while contact centres can be multichannel and omni-channel
- Call centres can use on-premise systems, while cloud-based or hybrid systems are more suitable for contact centres
- Call centre agents bring a basic set of skills, while contact centre agents must be expert in communication, multi-tasking, time management, product specialisation, and digital know-how
- Call centres operate on a limited set of KPIs, while contact centres have more qualitative performance targets
- Contact centres have a greater reliance on predictive and prescriptive analytics, while call centre analytics is mostly descriptive
How to Start the Transformation and Why
To transform your call centre into a contact centre and beyond, you need to invest in technology and agent improvements simultaneously. Migration to cloud-hosted contact centre systems, training/hiring omni-channel agents, investing in AI, and appointing digital strategists to head your agent workforce are some of the key steps on this journey.
By adapting your call centre to the needs of a digital CX, you can:
- Stay competitive and look beyond the existing non-digital-native customer base
- Reduce costs with AI-enabled bots that require very little human intervention
- Increase agent engagement through WFH powered by cloud systems, cross-skilling opportunities, and better pay, thanks to greater profitability
