Spring Clean Your Contact Centre

The days are finally getting longer and the anticipation of spring is in the air. It’s that time of the year which has us dusting off the winter blues, and for many businesses, the time to clean up their customer contact strategy to deliver the best customer experience ever.

According to Harris Interactive 60% of consumers prefer to pay more for better customer service and issue resolution.

Now doesn’t that make you want to make you want to polish your customer engagement and experience offering? Customer service can be the competitive differentiator for your business.

Your contact centre is the central point of customer contact through channels of their choice. Contact centres, like the seasons, need to continually change and evolve to deliver on customer expectations. Because customer expectations have changed. The once placid customer, is now active in driving changes in customer service, and the contact centre. About 10 years ago, if a customer had experienced unsatisfactory service, on an average, they would tell about 7 people about it. Today that number has now grown to 100s, thanks to social media.

The challenge is clear. Customers want seamless experiences from one channel to another – whether over web chat, email, self-service or a phone call, and in-channel query resolution is more important than ever. They want to contact you through channels of their choice and expect you to respond as promptly during busy periods as quieter ones.

Omni-channel, the bud that could blossom customer experience into fruitful pickings. However with customers demanding more channels, more complexity is added in creating channel-routing intelligence.

Many contact centre agents aren’t equipped with the right tools to help them achieve these new challenges set to them. In the 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, figures reveal that

• 40% of contact centres have no data analytics tools


• 52% don’t share customer intelligence across the organisation


• and a that 61% of core analytics systems are not integrated across the organisation

Dust those cobwebs

So why are contact centres not sweeping new strategies into action? Why do they find it difficult to introduce new technology, technologies that integrate with multiple systems that could offer a single view from customers?

What are the key trends for 2015 – how will/should contact centres change?

In this series of short blogs we will look at each of four predicted trends, giving some best practice tips to assist agile responses from both brands and contact centre agents to maintain market share and serve customers better.

Head in the clouds

Cloud-based software has become a lot more attractive in the last few years especially when compared to on-premise solutions. Cloud operations has many advantages such as scalability, the ease it offers to remote agents. It’s cost effective and simpler to deploy new systems without the need for labour intensive IT interference.

Cloud-based contact centres as opposed to on-premise installations not only allow businesses to extend a reliable service at the fraction of the cost, but reporting analytics, feedback and other tools can be added to deliver value at every user interaction. Automated updates ensure cloud-based contact centre software don’t gather dust like some legacy systems.

When choosing a vendor to supply a cloud-based contact centre infrastructure it is important to ask about its security, stability and reliability – especially so during peak times. A good vendor will have 24/7 monitoring and a dedicated team to respond to incidents, full back up, partitioned storage of data and a comprehensive business continuity plan.

According to Frost and Sullivan, cloud-based contact centres are expected to grow by 12.1% in terms of market share every year. And in 2015, 18% of contact centre seats will be delivered by cloud-based systems. In 2016, 50% of the Global 1000 companies will be utilising the power of the cloud.

The benefits of cloud hosted contact centres are clear, but it is worth looking at the different features and advancements vendors can offer to deliver on business customer service strategies focussed on delivering an omni-channel customer experience.

Spring Clean Your Contact Centre