6 Must Have Technologies for Strong Customer Support
Having a world-class call centre means investing in the necessary technologies to ensure it’s keeping up with the times — and outpacing your competition.
Contact centre managers know providing excellent customer support is job one for a successful operation. Today’s client is accustomed to round-the-clock access to answers and does not list patience among their top five virtues. That’s all right. Good contact centre agents can manage, if that is, they have access to a few crucial technology items for excellent customer support.
To make support your most noted virtue, you can’t leave your agents hanging with out-dated equipment and inadequate technology. In fact, Forrester Research reports 80 percent of companies claim customer service as a key way they position themselves against competitors in marketing materials. If you’re advertising quality support, but failing to arm your agents with a few key technologies, you’ll fall far behind the competition.
1. Call Monitoring/Recording
Good call monitoring software with recording capability is a definite must for keeping tabs on the way your agents provide service and capturing valuable data for future use. You never know when having accurate data on what exactly was promised will prove not only useful, but also necessary.
2. Souped-up Software
Be sure you’re upgrading your contact centre with cloud-based software to the cloud in order to keep track of copious amounts of customer information, histories, support issues, and other data, all without major hardware or software investment. There are a number of options available all with surprisingly reasonable costs and minimal learning curves, so look out for new software-as-a-service (SaaS) contact centre platforms to help maximize efficiency.
3. Call Labeling/Forwarding/ACD
Be sure you have a good automatic call distribution (ACD) setup to help you connect each caller to the appropriate agent, depending on factors like a specific support issue or customer VIP status. To create a seamless support experience, invest in call routing to help you label, sort, forward, and manage rising call volumes without sacrificing service levels or agent performance.
4. Workforce Management
Properly scaling scheduled agents is one of the most difficult aspects of contact centre management. Pairing agents to the optimum scheduled shift requires important historic data on call volume to create accurate staffing forecasts. A workforce management platform will help you project call volumes based on previous data and calendar considerations so you can schedule staff levels accordingly. When workforce management isn’t enough to balance staffing levels and provide effective support service, you may need to bring in third-party outsourced agents from a contact centre support service to help meet your fluctuating staffing needs.
5. Call-back Options
Reducing or even eliminating hold times is an excellent way to improve your support ratings. In a 24/7 online economy, customers no longer have the patience to wait indefinitely on hold. Excessive hold time is a key factor in customer attrition, with 62 percent of consumers in 2013 reporting they have switched service providers because of unsatisfactory customer service experiences (Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Survey). Adding a call-back option gives customers the chance to skip the holding queue and sign up for a call-back when an agent becomes available. This convenient option is highly prized among consumers, allowing them to carry on with their days without sacrificing valuable time dealing with a busy contact centre. Consider adding a call-back option to help your agents provide top-notch support with minimal inconvenience.
6. IVR
Some customer inquiries don’t require a live agent to be effectively resolved. You might consider adding an interactive voice response (IVR) menu to give callers the freedom to manage their issues with self-service when applicable. This can reduce operational costs and free up agents to manage more complex support issues.
Providing world-class customer support requires more than just hiring good people. To really soar as a contact centre offering top-of-the-line support, you need to empower your agents with smart technology that will help them up their service and support games. While these options do require initial investments, they promise long-term returns payable in positive customer experiences. For more information on how to provide support that is consistently first-class no matter the time of day, native language, or complexity of issue, download our free white paper.
