If you’re looking to optimize your customer service and expand your offer, then evolving your call center into a contact center could be the way forward.
Customer service is a crucial part of the broader customer experience, with greater demand than ever for businesses to offer multiple forms of communication.
Customer expectations are becoming more complex, and methods of communication are becoming more sophisticated, meaning that customer service departments must continue to evolve beyond a traditional call center with only phone-based communication.
A contact center represents an omnichannel approach to customer service that allows companies to elevate their customer experience.
So, what is a contact center? How does it work? And how does it differ from traditional call centers?
We’ll cover all that and offer the best tips on how you can grow a loyal and satisfied customer base, ensuring your business will thrive.
The omnichannel approach
When we talk about taking an omnichannel approach to customer service, we’re referring to using various channels to interact with customers - so they can choose the option that best suits them.
Omnichannel support can also include various formats for different devices so that customers have a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints throughout their journey.
What is the difference between a contact center and a call center?
While a traditional call center will handle inbound and outbound customer calls with phone support, a full support customer service center will provide omnichannel support across calls, email, web chat, text messaging, social media, and potentially offer more sophisticated functions like screen sharing and video conferencing.
Instead of customers waiting on phone calls, they have the option to simply instant message a business and deal with another task while waiting for a response. This form of synchronous messaging is an increasingly popular feature of customer service.
Also, this means that customers can choose their preferred channel, and businesses can expand their reach and branding efforts.
Call centers are still essential to customer service; a talented call center agent can be an important asset. And contact centers are simply taking that support a step further. The key to an effective omnichannel support center is combining technology and human resources to deliver the best customer experience.
Why are contact centers important?
Today, customers are becoming more comfortable with a digital-led customer experience. If you want to scale your customer service and make it more comprehensive and convenient, upgrading to a contact center with an omnichannel approach is an effective way to achieve this.
Implementing one provides an excellent opportunity for exciting innovations to your customer experience. Contact centers, with their easy access to advanced software and tools, also allow your agents to personalize their service to a greater extent than ever, with the use of easily available customer insights.
You can apply voice analytics, analyzing the tone, pitch, stress and rhythm of the agent and the customer’s voices to manage calls. Speech analytics can help in a similar fashion, by analyzing key words and phrases. Previous customer interactions could be subject to interaction analytics to identify upselling or cross-selling opportunities. And after the call ends, you can follow up with a customer satisfaction survey to capture more information.
You can also collect data along the customer journey to capture and apply key metrics - such as average wait time per channel, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction scores and customer retention rate - to analyze and improve the employee and customer experience.
How does a contact center work?
To be specific, ‘contact center’ is a broad term to mean different forms of contact center solutions.
There are hosted centers, which are maintained in-house in a physical space; cloud-based centers, where the center is on an internet server and accessible from anywhere in the world; and hybrid centers, which are a mix of the two.
Applying modern contact center software, with cloud-based solutions, means that companies can add functionality and capacity at scale.
For example, you may want to consider using chatbots powered by conversational AI. Through advanced machine learning, they can respond to requests by customers and resolve issues, do that your agents are freed up to deal with more complex queries.
Advanced voice bots work in much the same way, guiding a customer through solutions so they can take a self-service approach and resolve issues at their own convenience. They lower waiting times and drop-off rates, can resolve inquiries 24/7 and improve first call resolution rates.
To manage your team, you may also want to consider investing in a workforce management system that monitors high-volume call times and sets schedules for your staff to meet demand.
CRM software also ensures agents get all the customer information they need to solve queries as quickly as possible and offers insights into customer interactions for analysis and monitoring.
Inbound and outbound contact centers
So, how do the terms inbound and outbound apply to contact centers?
Inbound refers to incoming calls and queries that must be resolved. Inbound calls tend to be more oriented towards customer service or technical support, helping to answer questions and address complaints.
Outbound contact centers are generally more dependent on agents reaching out to existing or potential customers, to make sales or publicize the business.
Outbound calls also include upselling and cross-selling, where a business reaches out to an existing customer to persuade them to either upgrade their existing product or service (upselling) or purchase another related product or service (cross-selling).
It is either through inbound or outbound activities, or a combination of the two, that a contact center achieves its business goals.
The benefits of a contact center approach
Offering support across multiple channels
Updating your support so that your customer has multiple options for communication while receiving the same consistent information no matter where they search, broadening your accessibility and convenience.
Greater inclusivity
In the past, customers with disabilities, especially those who are hard of hearing, would have struggled with phone interactions. A modern contact center offers screen readers, closed captioning, video functionality, and text-based communications for more inclusive support.
Reactive, responsive support
Today’s customers are busy people and expect a quicker response time than ever. Now, contact centers can offer instant messaging options, potentially available with 24/7 support, and across multiple touch-points.
Greater customer engagement
Being proactive in resolving issues and responding to customers will help your business build more positive, lasting relationships. A satisfied customer is a loyal customer who may return to use your product or service again.
Deeper insights and analytics
You can build a bigger picture of your customer behavior thanks to knowledge of their interaction and activity history, and adapt your approach towards them accordingly. With so much data mapped, you can also spot gaps in your customer service and opportunities for improvement.
Give your sales a boost
With more channels and greater insights, you will also find more opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell your products and services, while in a traditional call center, such sales opportunities may never have presented themselves.
Effective contact center management
While the benefits are clear, you need effective management to ensure everything is working as it should. A skilled contact center manager will hire new team members, lead training sessions and onboarding, assign roles and responsibilities, outline key metrics and objectives for success, track operational costs in line with the budget, analyze metrics and performance indicators and ensure efficiency.
Whether it’s a large center with a significant number of agents working across different skill sets, or a small, concentrated team, it’s likely that a manager’s responsibilities will remain the same.
Above all, it’s important to create a positive work environment that empowers your employees. This means that a skilled manager must have an inherent understanding of what makes effective customer service, an ability to communicate with openness and transparency, good problem-solving skills, and a high degree of empathy and emotional intelligence.
A knowledge of how to harness technology to support agents will also help prevent burnout and give them more time to work on those complicated queries, which can lead to great job satisfaction and team morale.
How to measure contact center performance
Once your contact center is up and running, with the principles of good management in place, it’s time to understand how to measure if you’re actually running it correctly.
This is where metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. You need to track the right metrics and KPIs to evaluate the overall performance of the contact center. Here is a selection of key metrics to consider tracking.
First contact resolution
This metric refers to the number of issues that are resolved upon the first contact a customer makes with your business. If an issue is solved within a single exchange, it’s likely that customer satisfaction will be higher.
Number of interactions
Helpful for workflow and evaluating workload, this metric allows you to see which channel or form of communication receives the most interactions, meaning you can assign agents accordingly.
Transfer rate
This rate helps you see how many inbound contacts that agents must transfer to another team member or department. If you have a high transfer rate, it’s possible that customers are reaching the wrong first point of contact.
Average response time
Consider how long it takes your agent to answer, reply or accept a request from a customer. Especially in instant messaging, many customers now expect a real-time response.
Average wait time per channel
According to studies, 60% of customers report that they will hang up if left on hold for longer than a minute. This is relevant for a live chat too. Customers hate waiting, and the feeling that their time is being wasted.
Average resolution time
You can measure how long it takes for a customer’s issue to be resolved; useful for efficiency but it’s not the full story. Most of the time, it’s preferable that a slower resolution is handled effectively than a faster resolution is handled badly.
Each business will require different metrics and indicators, as every business is unique in how it measures success. It’s important you research, identify and plan what you want to know about your contact center performance before you commit to capturing data.
The future of contact center technology
Industries and sectors around the world are undergoing rapid digital transformation and a rise in the use of advanced technology in contact centers is no different.
There are various trends arising in omnichannel customer service that include the advancement of artificial intelligence. These trends will form the basis for how brands and businesses evolve their customer experience and meet the changing demands of the customer.
Self-service, equipping the customer to resolve their issues independently, will be enabled by more sophisticated tech solutions. Conversational AI, with the use of chatbots and virtual assistants, will become more commonplace and more sophisticated.
It’s likely that contact centers will evolve into what is known as ‘Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)’, with a recognized set of solutions with no hardware that businesses of all sizes can implement, especially useful for remote working.
Automated coaches could become a crucial feature of training and onboarding agents, with the ability to provide remote assistance and coaching using digital tools.
When you see what the future holds, it becomes more important than ever for businesses and brands to invest in contact center solutions now. Optimizing your customer experience with omnichannel solutions will ensure top-quality customer service in an increasingly competitive field.
An omnichannel contact center offers greater options for responsive and inclusive support. You will be better able to capture insights and analytics to better understand your customers and create more sales opportunities. A customer who is satisfied with your efficient customer service is more likely to return, building loyalty and customer retention. With a base of loyal customers, your business can grow. It all begins with your contact center.