How to Scale Your Business with Contact Center software?

Contact centers are often struggling with lenghty customer queues, poor customer satisfaction, and inter-departmental friction. Inter-departmental friction can be caused by lack of communication, poor analytical data exchange and separated silos of information. More troubles are brought about by poor application of contact center software in a contact center. All of these individual issues can together result in inferior decision making and lose of customer.

Customer experience needs to constantly evolve especially for the brand to stay relevant. Distinctive features will allow you leverage your service for greater revenue. Therefore, the system in place should always induce scalability, to sustain your growth.

A dependable workforce is important to run your contact center however, it is not the absolute. A contact center software which paves room for improvement is what you will also need. With multiple channels in place, conducting equal level of quality and gathering newer information is the primary goal.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning – Bill Gates

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A contact center software is a digital solution that enables the customer service team or sales reps to engage with customers and prospects over voice and non-voice medium. There are various features of contact center software that allows better conversations and agent utilisation, notably:

1. Predictive Calling:

The most ideal way to make use of your time is via predictive calling. The dialer will automatically make calls to all your leads before the agent sits on their desk. This makes sure of dead leads or unanswered clients. The ones who do respond, gets immediately connected to the next available agent. This saves a lot of time and relieves the agents of redundant tasks.

2. Call Back Feature:

Call centers are often jammed with multiple calls and lengthy queues. Customers on queues gets frustrated with the long wait. Instead, with call back feature, the IVR will automatically prompt the customer to get called back by the agent when he is free or they can choose to stay on hold. This shows that you value customer’s time which is important for retention all the while managing your queues as well.

3. Call Routing: 

Typically designed for efficiency, call routing is a system of assigning various calls by the customer into its respective department and service. These calls are assigned based on the inquiry, skill sets, language, availability, and location.

4. Co-Browsing:

Customers who are unable to track their way through their problem will also struggle when speaking to the agent. To speed up the process and reach a resolution easily, the agent can request to co-browse where the agent can work with the customer on their browser in real-time. Customers who struggle with your website can benefit the most out of this.


Source: Upscope

5. Automated Conversation is driven by AI:

Another queue management tool is automated conversations. Deploying chatbots can allow your agents to focus on more difficult cases. The chatbot with its access to your knowledge base and prior learning, it can resolve most common customer issues like payment due date, available balance check, failed payment and more.

6. Video Calls:

Video calls can enhance your conversations with peak personalization. A face-to-face virtual conversation will ensure that the customer get complete attention. You can leverage the interface for product demonstration, presentations, customer verification and more.

There are multiple ways to scale business with contact center directly:

1. Outbound Call Center – for lead generation call
2. Social media response – quick response to product/service enquiries
3. Google Business Message – to generate lead and handover to live agents
   
   Source: Google Developers
    
4. Voicebots or Chatbots – to respond to customer enquiries

However, for inbound contact centers, the key purpose is customer service. While this doesn’t scale the business directly as the outbound process does but creating a happy customer is the biggest gain that the contact center provides to business. This indirectly scales the business apart from some cross sell, upsell the agent does.
In this blog, we will discuss more in depth how to scale business with contact center software.

Businesses of different scales have different resource range and will need appropriate curation. A small business shouldn’t invest in an on-premise contact center solution, instead should go for cloud solution. Based on such distinctions, we will discuss scalability for both kinds of businesses.

For small scale businesses: 

When resources are limited, it is important to choose the solution that fits your goal. On premise solutions require expensive hardware, dedicated IT teams, longer time for installations and more. Above all, you will need a dedicated space to host this setup and accommodate your agents with in-house benefits.

However, a cloud contact center solution will enable scalability at efficient rate. Let’s see how:

1. Hire remotely and expand as per need:

Small businesses should utilise every benefit that they can. To run their business globally, it is best to hire remote agents than to host offices at every corner of the world. This is possible, thanks to cloud-contact center software. With no need for infrastructure maintenance, employees can conduct calls through cloud. All you need to do is provide your agents with smartphones, and through their unique ids, they can login to the server and conduct daily customer conversations. With a cloud solution, infrastructure migration is easier and less time consuming which will boost your operational efficiency.

There is no need to rent office space, waste time in installations or worry about fixed costs. Instead, hire remote agents with more credibility and scale as per need.  
 

2. Omnichannel support for various channels:

As a budding business, you must be serving on several touchpoints like WhatsApp, social media, email, IVR and web chat. On cloud-solution, the channels are already integrated for efficiency and allows you enable omnichannel strategy. Through this, you can maintain customer’s relationship history and conversational context across channels. As the adage goes – “be where your customers are”, so help your customer reach you through the most convenient channel. With more gentrified customer service, you will able to retain your customers and make the most return out of your investment.


Source: Beabloo

3. Real-time agent monitoring:

Lastly, you can monitor your agents and employees remotely to mimic in-house management style. The real-time agent metrics and call metrics become an essential resource of information to take micro-decisions and improve your contact centre operational efficiency. Your managers can dedicate on-call training, or barge-in when needed based on performance metrics. So, with remote teams, not under one-roof, real-time monitoring is a great advantage and boosts call center productivity.

4. Scalability with flexible solutions:

A cloud solution will ensure your expansion into different markets without the need to increase your budget or team. All operations can be conducted conveniently with existing solutions within the company. This includes smart integration of your CRM, Lead management systems, ticketing systems, knowledge base, workforce management and many more productivity tools.
 

For large scale businesses:

Larger ogranizations do not need to worry about basic infrastructural needs. Thanks to their existing revenue streams and primary investments, they can afford to expand with a little more grandeur. Such organization will already have their own call centers with dedicated office spaces around the globe. 

However, these organizations will also have a vast customer pool and the responsibility towards them is crucial. From offering engagement to ensuring fast resolution, you need a dependable software that will ensure complete results. 

1. Enhance frontline efficiency:

Agents will be moving to-and-fro on different channels to keep up with customer conversations. This is a waste of time for agents and customers as well. Making your customers provide context with every interaction is tedious. Instead, implementing an omnichannel strategy will eradicate the friction between channels. With context being maintained, agents can pick up a conversation at any point with more efficiency.
 

2. Familiarity for customer comfort:

Building relationships with every customer is essential for generating loyalty. However, with scripted responses and different agents at every conversation, customers always feel detached from the brand. A well-integrated contact center software will connect the customer to the agent they were connected to before, aka as Sticky Agents! Thus enabling a personalized interaction. If that agent is busy, then it will route to any other available agent or let the agent call back. Its nice to interact with the person (agent) that you have become comfortable with.
 

3. Centralized System for better collaboration:

A contact center software will have a common database with different levels of access. This allows different teams to access real-time data and execute their tasks without any hurdles. Thanks to this, there is no disjointed silos of information created amongst departments. Moreover, it ensures a smooth communication between teams when dealing with end-to-end deals.
 

4. Hybrid solution for business continuity:

Businesses with on-premise can struggle with business continuity in face of unforeseen events such as pandemics or natural calamities. The coronavirus pandemic has made everyone realize that it is important to be ready for such events in the future as well, to escape tremendous losses. A hybrid solution is the way to go. The hardware related to the telephony systems will be on-premise, however, the remaining software is hosted on cloud. This will ensure that the agents can conduct their calls through the on-premise server, despite being at home. Businesses can also leverage this solution to expand to remote areas and hire local help for serving more customers.
 

Scaling your business is a possibility, when you are able to retain a majority of your customers and expand on that revenue. This cannot be achieved through mediocre technical support and frictional operation. Investing to scale business with contact center software will transform the way your team approaches a customer. With increased possibilities of engagement, you will be increasing your profits in no-time. Moreover, bringing value to customers will improve your credibility and entice more customers. To understand the impact of contact center software in more detail, request a demo with C-Zentrix.