6 Effective Ways To Modernize Your Contact Center's Technology

The most important touchpoint for every business is their hotline or their telephony service. We all know the universal truth that satisfactory customer support enhances brand reputation. In order to ensure the consistency of the customer service standards, we need to start from the basics. The first question you must ask yourself should be: “How up-to-date is your contact center technology?”

Contact Centers are the backbone of your industry. They are the acting bridge between your product and your customers. This bridge of communication should be based upon a flawless infrastructure with minimal shortcomings. We at C-Zentrix often made our best efforts in elevating this particular route of communication so you can provide the best for your customers. Nevertheless, technology keeps evolving and we want to ensure that you are keeping up with it.

Six Effective Ways you can modernize your Contact Center:

Agents are hard-pressed for their time and they need to respond quickly from one issue to the next one. And the average attrition is also high in this industry. AI-based agent assistant is a great savior. It is trained with the historical data and can prompt the next best action/resolution to the agent.

While bots have been mainly customer-facing, agent assistant is smart bots that help the agents to quickly find the resolution. 

Furthermore, if you integrate your CRM with an AI-Based Agent Assistant, it can crawl various information like previous customer purchases or CSAT scores and prompt relevant data while the agent is responding to the client. This is the new age digital worker who is going to improve agent productivity. 

Chatbots are the present and the future of customer service. They are the first in the line of your defense. In other words, chatbots are essential as they can take on most low-touch customer support queries. Customers no longer have to wait in a telephony queue to acquire a resolution. Chatbots are trained using NLU (Natural Language Understanding) to understand the intent and then provide the best possible response. It is obvious that complex issues require human assistance. However, other primary requirements can be fulfilled via a chatbot. They can be employed 24x7 which ensures cost-efficiency and reduction of human error. 

When you equip your contact center with chatbots, you reserve valuable agent time for further complicated tasks that need human attention. Smart allocation of labor enhances scalability. The majority of times chatbots have proven to provide satisfactory results and can be considered as a digital team members in the customer service team. Chatbots are intelligent, seamlessly efficient, and definitely reliable. 83% of businesses state that artificial intelligence is a key priority in their journey towards better CX and business management.

Employing voicebots is an indispensable step towards complete automation. Even though most millennials p

refer chat-based channels to call, phones are still a primary mode of communication between a brand and its customers. Thus, enriching telephone communication but providing personalized attention to every individual can be a key differentiator. This is where voicebots will deliver. If you have heard of Alexa or Siri, you already know how voicebots function. They recognize your speech and extracts the intent and triggers the most relevant responses. What is interesting here is to understand the context and maintain a natural conversation. Thus, new-gen voicebots are capable of mimicking complete human behavior minus the foghorns and nervousness of an agent. IVRs were often aloof of the individual customer information. It just aided the customer in the right queue for acquiring assistance. 

However, voicebots will proactively crawl through the CRM and provide personalized information to the customer, making the process effortless and time-efficient. The various utilities of voicebot also include automatic customer verification, purchase updates, scheduling in-person servicing, activation/deactivation of services, and more. Voicebots are cost-efficient as well compared to the fair expense of hiring human agents. Furthermore, as voicebots is purely speech-based, it helps a variety of differently-abled consumers, allowing you to provide a reliable environment for all your customers. It is a safe bet that voicebots are the future of contact center technology.

Every brand has multiple touchpoints witnessing multiple interactions across platforms. Adopting an omnichannel strategy is a must as it will unify the data collected via multiple touchpoints. You cannot let your agent scout through various disconnected touchpoints, for relevant information before he or she addresses the customer. Omnichannel support will empower your agent with all the customer information, reducing effort, and making a positive impact on the customer.

Reports have shown that companies with proper omnichannel strategy, have witnessed at least 10% growth every year. Customers do not want to repeat their problems over and over again; every time they interact. Omnichannel binds together every piece of information, eventually not needing the customer to repeat similar information. It actually reflects the customer journey. This simple unification of data makes a larger impact on the entire process. It saves agents time, allows seamless interaction with the customer, offers the first-call resolution, and elevates the quality of the customer service.

How often are you under duress for the non-availability of agents on a specific day? While your regular planning tool was good but it doesn’t forecast the agent availability. Well, you need a shrinkage analyzer. 

Shrinkage is nothing but the specific difference between the expected hours of agent’s work and the actual hours of work done by the agent. Internal shrinkage is often caused due to internal activities like agent onboarding processes, meetings, system shortcomings, unscheduled breaks, miscellaneous works. External shrinkage includes leaves, late-to-office, sick leaves. 

These are all human shortcomings and cannot be avoided. However, you can analyze the probability of agent availability based on leave applications, break logins, and no call - no show, typical to this industry. A deep shrinkage analyzer can make predictions by observing the last 90 days pattern and provide a more accurate shrinkage. As contact centers have a huge number of employees, it often becomes hectic to keep agent activity in check. So, this improves workforce planning and you are left with fewer surprises.

A few years ago, the Swedish mogul IKEA encouraged video calls as a form of customer service. Customers could call anytime and get a video demonstration on how to put together the DIYs. Eventually, more industry found it intriguing and adopted the same. The results have been surprisingly positive. Customers do prefer a transparent conversation where they can actually see the agent trying to help them with a resolution. This reflects extremely well on the character of the brand. 

Video calls also ease down several processes like customer onboarding, KYC verifications, immediate crisis resolution, post-sale set-up. Video calls bring different value to the different industry if utilized and promoted the right way. 
 

As an organization, it is imperative that you adapt to the latest customer support technology to keep up with the audacious ecosystem. Invest your money in the right tools, so you can meet your customer’s expectations, proactively. The variant 6 ways discussed above will bring together the bigger picture that is a ubiquitous customer support system. Meeting your KPIs will seem easier than ever and the results are ought to be evident. Contact center technology is constantly evolving to meet the rising demands of the customers, especially since the coronavirus has altered the normal workspace. Thus, educate yourself and improvise. A contact center must deliver irrespective of the unprecedented times that we encounter.