Contact centres are witnessing an overload of customer interactions and attempting to adopt numerous methods to enhance efficiency and boost productivity. However, it can be challenging to understand which elements need to be prioritised to establish efficient future contact centres. Mathias Holzinger, Product Manager at TeamViewer, provides a guide to help understand the elements better.
As the world attempts to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, every industry is witnessing change as it scrambles to adapt to the ‘new normal’ with contact centres at the forefront of change. After seeing an overload of customer interactions, industries worldwide realised the need to upgrade their contact centre workflows and find new ways to provide customer support.
As more companies are willing to experiment with new technology that may ease the workflow and improve KPIs, the field of customer engagement is witnessing an immense transformation. With advanced AI, high-performing visual engagement tools and improved chatbots being implemented across contact centres, technology is paving the way for future contact centres. Here are a few functionalities essential for your contact centre of the future:
Automate services and incorporate visual engagement technology
Improving agents’ efficiency is essential and can be done by incorporating a visual engagement solution that seamlessly integrates with the current workflow. This enables agents to guide customers to an answer on the first call, providing a resolution at the first go with reduced average handling time. Visual engagement tools can boost KPIs by improving the net promoter score, providing first contact resolution and ultimately increasing the productivity of agents.
Furthermore, automating services by adding virtual agents will enhance the capabilities of the visual agents, helping implement new technology. Companies should also review their contact centre management system and workflow, prioritising the most critical needs, ultimately creating a cost-effective solution.
Implementing the latest technology
Contact centres need to adopt new and proven-to-work technology if they want to enhance their KPIs. With ever-increasing technology, customer expectations are on the rise and they want minimal wait times alongside first call resolution. With the right tools, industry leaders can get ahead of the game and enhance the customer experience as well as contact centre productivity.
Firstly, self-service technology has refashioned the face of customer service as most customers get answers to their questions before even reaching the support agent. This has a direct impact on increasing revenue and customer acquisition.
Secondly, interactive voice response technology (IVR) is an essential tool that allows customers to interact with a company’s host system through speech recognition or a telephone pad. However, customers tend to dislike IVR systems, and it is vital to implement a seamless IVR design that is easy to follow so that customers don’t have to go through endless prompts.
Lastly, co-browsing technology can quickly guide a customer to a solution, allowing support agents to see what the customer sees on their screen without downloads or installations. As it is being optimised for web and mobile, agents can easily click, scroll, and highlight key information, guiding the customer to their much-awaited solution. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with the existing methods of communication such as phones, emails, and chat sessions, providing personal support in real-time across numerous channels.
AI technology – Incorporate and empower
Contact centres are using AI to streamline call centre experiences for agents and customers. They are analysing call data and records to predict customer behaviour. As AI provides straightforward engagement across the customer experience, it makes the customer journey easy while saving call centre managers hours of creating call routing algorithms.
By incorporating an AI system, businesses can minimise the customer wait time by routing conversations to suitable agents. As a result, AI drastically improves the efficiency of agents and the contact centre as a whole. As the agent can now provide multiple solutions and responses, it gives the customer more choice and the agent can choose whether to follow the AI’s suggestion or disregard it. As AI matures day by day, implementing such a powerful, cost-saving tool will help businesses cut down heavy burdens on the agents and drive revenue to the company.
Providing better support with omnichannel communications
Businesses globally are now focusing on providing a holistic customer engagement approach that utilises unified models of omnichannel communication. As customers value the ability to engage with a company through multiple avenues simultaneously, it is important to provide them with the same. Furthermore, as the customer journey is quite complex and has various touchpoints, it is crucial to develop omnichannel communications as they can lay out better customer support practices and provide a healthy foundation for businesses to grow and strive.
Optimise agent idle time and provide routine training
For any call centre to succeed, it is necessary to optimise workforce management. As the role of agents can get quite tedious, breaks are a must. However, it is important to differentiate between breaks and idle time. Reducing sedentary time while assigning tasks per the agent’s strengths and weaknesses is essential if contact centres want to improve their agent’s productivity drastically.
At the same time, managers and leaders must ensure that the agents aren’t stressed or facing burnout by providing them short and frequent breaks throughout their shifts. The agents need to be well-rested and have a positive mindset if they are to help the customers and achieve a favourable resolution, creating an excellent experience for the client.
Additionally, it is imperative to improve the knowledge and capabilities of the agents by providing them with routine training. This will also speed up the company processes, raise first call resolution, and decrease the handling time. Once companies have spotted suitable agents for the job, they must conduct regular training sessions to ensure they can handle incoming and outgoing calls effectively. It is important to note that leaders must make this as fun as possible so that the agents don’t find it cumbersome. The sessions can be fun and rewarding by creating healthy competition by adding gamification. Gamification includes the implementation of game mechanics to motivate employee engagement and achievement, often eliciting a positive response.
At its core, a contact centre can only thrive if its employees are well-trained and cared for. Equipping them with the right tools, latest technology and effective solutions will go a long way in establishing the contact centres for the future.