5 Technological Upgrades for Contact Centre Success
Move beyond the stone-age of customer service support and enhance your contact centre with productivity boosting technology.
The success of your contact centre relies on technology. While other factors like agent ability and procedural efficiency are important, even the most flexible agents in the world can get bogged down by unintuitive applications and a lack of integrated tech.
Don’t be one of the contact centres who fails to utilize the variety of new technology available for customer service. By applying applications specifically designed to enhance the efficiency of your contact centre, you can increase agent productivity, decrease handle times and queue congestion, and create a more enjoyable service experience for all involved.
Tools for Success
Technology can improve the contact centre in a wide variety of ways, many of which aren’t being utilized by industry players: data collected by Forrester revealed that 42 percent of agents are unable to help their customers due to outdated technology and excessive numbers of applications.
Let’s assume that you want your centre to perform at a slightly higher level, and review five of the available tech options for better contact centre support:
Speech Analytics
There’s a wealth of information flowing between you and your caller—and many contact centres are missing out on it completely.
Speech analytic tools collect valuable information about the dialogue between agent and caller, and structures it in ways that make it easy to analyze. This speech reviewal drives efficiency by giving managers direct feedback, ways to assess productivity, and better identification of procedural inefficiencies that hamper agent activity.
Speech analytics also have the benefit of preserving the natural voice of the interaction—tone of voice, speech patterns, and emotional vocalizations can all be leveraged to get a better understanding of the customer experience.
Real-time Decisioning and Monitoring
Gathering data for later review is one thing, but what if you could analyze a call as it’s happening? A new trend in speech analytics involves the use of real-time decisioning tools that make assessments and analyses while agents are on the line. This allows agents and supervisors to adapt their service to the changing flow of the call and respond immediately to any escalating service issues.
Video Tools
While not typically thought of as a customer self-service option, video support can augment the contact centre by providing visual how-tos for customers needing help. Video tutorials can be featured on your support site to address common concerns, and can effective at reducing the rate of calls coming in.
Mobile and Applications
Mobile use is showing no signs of slowing, and contact centres must accommodate the trend. A 2015 Internet Trends report by KPCB revealed that mobile media use has overtaken desktop usage, with supporting data by Nielsen showing that 89 percent of consumer mobile time is spent on applications.
This is a big opportunity for contact centres—customer service applications for mobile use can provide a level of outreach never before possible. Service apps are designed to be user-friendly and streamline the customer service process, freeing up your other channels and reducing handle times all in one move.
Desktop Analytics
Originally developed as a type of draconian monitoring software for employee activity, desktop analytics have emerged into a revolutionary area of contact centre support. Desktop analytics can be used to:
- Monitor employee performance
- Identify web-based procedures that prevent staff from quickly meeting customer needs
- Automating data transfer and collection across applications
Working Together
Many customer service issues require multiple applications and channels to address, resulting in fragments of customer data being spread across various channels. The inefficiency of switching between tools that haven’t been integrated can wreak havoc on productivity when a comprehensive customer profile is needed quickly.
Instead of wasting time and effort switching between isolated devices, contact centres should select customer service tools that can synchronize with their software and allow integration between applications and CRM systems.
Aggregating customer data from all of your available channels and displaying it in a cohesive interface allows your team to access your entire library of data from a single hub. This instant access will reduce handle times, increase the real-time flexibility of your agents, and create a better overall customer experience.
The Right Tools for the Right Job
In the modern age of developing technology, contact centres no longer have an excuse for using outdated applications and isolated service channels. By using the right tools to enhance the performance of their agents, contact centres can gather more caller data, better apply data in comprehensive ways, and find a level of service flexibility that was never before possible.
Want to learn about more tools that can increase the flexibility and effectiveness of your customer service? Check out our free white paper!
