February 26, 2019 by Siobhan Climer
The technology that powers the contact center is changing every day. As businesses continue to shift their focus towards the customer and delivering superior services, contact center platforms provide the opportunity for change.
Contact center platforms increase efficiencies on multiple fronts. Supervisors are better able to manage call center agents, schedules, and customer calling dynamics. Contact center managers and directors can use contact center platforms to record and analyze customer engagements, using the data to improve metrics.
Today’s contact center platforms also utilize developments in cloud and hybrid IT to enable improved flexibility, scalability, and integration with other contact center tools and custom applications. Here are five ways we found contact center platforms increase efficiencies in the call center today.
Contact Center Platforms Increase Efficiencies
Workforce Management (WFM)
With workforce management tools, the contact center management team can use analytics to optimize agent scheduling. Contact channel volume – whether via phone calls, emails, texts, or other channels – varies hour by hour, day by day.
By using these predictive analytics, contact center platforms increase efficiencies by ensuring an accurate headcount. This reduces call center costs and improves overall operations.
Today’s contact center platforms – like Cisco’s Customer Journey Platform or the Genesys PureCloud platform – provide a real-time, intuitive user experience giving contact center supervisors improved management capabilities. Instead of guessing, managers have the analytics and tools to support the decision to send agents home early or reach out to on-call staff before the center is slammed.
Call Recording
Contact center leaders understand the value of call recording, whether for training, compliance, or assessment purposes. Recording calls, and other call functions (like listen, whisper, or barge) ensure that the moment-to-moment interactions between call center agents and customers are documented.
In the most drastic scenarios, supervisors may rely on these call recordings in customer disputes or legal proceedings. More often, though, these recordings provide valuable data to supervisors:
How did agents resolve the call? What was the primary purpose of the contact? Could the customer’s purpose have been solved more efficiently through self-service tools?
Contact center platforms provide the tools by which to record and monitor calls effectively. Call recording also gives supervisors data on which to evaluate contact center agents. In a field with notoriously high employee turnover, valuable and data-driven feedback can help supervisors develop the training and resources agents need to be successful. Contact center platforms increase efficiencies by using the data from customer calls to proactively target areas of improvement for the call center.
Read more about improving the call center through targeted data analytics with our latest eBook: Customers Drive, You Navigate: Your Contact Center Roadmap to Customer Care Success.
Call Reporting
Visibility is the word of the day in technology development. Visibility into your network. Visibility into your data. Visibility into your governance models, security frameworks, and database tools. Contact centers are no different. Once call center leaders have visibility into the real-time performance of the contact center, they are able to gather actionable insights.
How long is your average call? How many calls are lost in the IVR before reaching an agent? To answer these questions – which can help leaders create more efficient, effective policies and business products and services – contact centers need a way to gather and analyze call metrics.
Contact center platforms increase efficiencies by delivering these metrics to agents and their supervisors. Goals are more easily set and met with proper data collection and analysis. Contact center platforms do the heavy lifting for you. Find and correct issues in real-time and improve performance, reduce attrition, increase customer satisfaction, decrease costs, and raise revenue.
Agility
Scalability. Flexibility. Whatever you want to call it, contact centers need to adapt to the moment-to-moment changes of the market. If a company product faces recall, or a new federal policy triggers increased customer attention, or perhaps it’s simply your business’ “busy season”, contact centers face constant variability in call volumes. Remaining agile and scaling resources to meet those needs can be a challenge.
Contact center platforms increase efficiencies by ensuring the easy scaling up and down of agents through simplified onboarding, usage-based subscription billing, and the predictive tools to know when more agents – or less – will be needed.
In particular, cloud-based contact center platforms offer increased flexibility. Learn more about Genesys PureCloud here and read more about Cisco Customer Journey Platform below:
Cisco Customer Journey Platform: Exclusive Access To The Cloud-Based Contact Center
Integrations
Custom integrations are a valuable tool in the contact center. Retrieving customer information, ensuring adherence to federal regulations, and providing opportunities to upsell or further support the customer experience are all ways in which contact center platforms can improve overall performance efficiencies.
Recently, the Mindsight Custom Integrations team worked with a legal services agency to create custom screen-pops, ensuring the caller was transferred to the right representative, who also then received the right information about the client. This improved workflow increased efficiencies for the agency, and the team presented their findings at a recent conference.
Screen Pops Improve The Customer Experience: Mindsight Presents At LSC
Increase Your Contact Center Efficiency Today
Contact centers should be well-oiled machines. By improving workflows and data analysis tools, contact center platforms increase efficiencies throughout the call center. When agents and supervisors, managers and executives are empowered to make data-driven decisions based on real-time analytics, the potential for growth is unmistakable.
Finding a contact center platform that meets the needs of your call center is not impossible, and the Mindsight contact center team can help. We provide weekly (free!) whiteboard sessions and demo days. Come chat about your current needs and demo platforms in your environment safely. Get started improving the efficiency of your contact center today.
Register for your free Whiteboard Session or Demo Day here.
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About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.
About The Author
Siobhan Climer, Science and Technology Writer for Mindsight, writes about technology trends in education, healthcare, and business. She previously taught STEM programs in elementary classrooms and museums, and writes extensively about cybersecurity, disaster recovery, cloud services, backups, data storage, network infrastructure, and the contact center. When she’s not writing tech, she’s writing fantasy, gardening, and exploring the world with her twin two-year old daughters. Find her on twitter @techtalksio.
5 Ways The Cloud Improves The Customer Experience: Contact Center Report
