Four Suggestions for How Tech Can Improve Contact Center Performance

The real differentiator in seamless contact center performance comes from having a strong frontline. Each interaction should be treated as a chance for contact center agents to distinguish the brand and create superior recall value in the customer’s mind. Any sort of hitch or delay in delivering a seamless customer experience immediately translates to a less than stellar brand impression in the customer’s mind. Over time, these kinds of imperfect, unsatisfactory experiences can add up to permanent loss of customers, damage in brand reputation, and consequently, loss of revenue.

I may be biased, but I believe managed IT services may be a difference-maker in boosting contact center performance. Here’s how:

Use IVR for a seamless customer experience

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a commonly used tool for contact centers to harness all available information about customers even before they are connected to the agents. This enables agents to prepare themselves for the conversation as the customer information is displayed in real time. This helps agents to streamline their calls and simplifies workload. This also leaves agents free to deal with more complicated issues that demand their attention.

Merge databases to simplify research

Using multiple databases in contact center operations can create a lot of confusion. This process forces agents to review information contained in each, in different locations, that results in delays. This kind of inefficiencies can be averted by merging all information on customers into a single unified database. This could eventually take the form of an interaction analytics solution that helps contact center agents to have instant access to data and results in better customer service.

Empower your agents with the best technology

With data and call volumes only growing larger every day, it is impossible for contact center agents to waste valuable time in trying to track important customer information during a call. Specialized technologies, such as computer telephony integration (CTI), can help agents to collect all necessary customer information from a single unified database prior to each call. This streamlines customer-agent interaction and offers better resolution times with a lot less hassle for contact center agents.

Utilize skills-based routing

Skills-based routing technology is very helpful in reducing call transfers and increasing FCR. This technology can even be implemented in a shared agent environment, where calls can rotate between your entire agent population. Skills-based routing ensures that customer queries are matched with agents who have the requisite skill sets to effectively help them. For instance, if there is a new customer asking for information on a specific product, this call should be ideally routed to an agent with great onboarding skills, rather than an agent who specializes in a different skill set.