In March 2020, the world was turned upside down overnight. When it comes to the way we work, what is considered an office, and how we utilize technology there is no turning back. There is no “going back to how it was”. For many companies, their timeline for migrating to the cloud or appetite for working from anywhere was accelerated, to put it mildly.
Contact center leaders across the globe had to quickly find and implement technology that usually takes months to fully understand. IT leaders were facing long hours and staffing challenges before the pandemic, so it is understandable if your contact center has new CCaaS solutions that no one fully comprehends.
Cutting through the noise and giving real advice is what we do. We have had the opportunity to speak with numerous IT and contact center leaders and they all share a commonality in questioning if they made the right decision and what to do now with the technology investment they made. In short, how do you rationalize today’s business priorities with decisions that were made 2 years ago?
Here we tackle the questions we hear most and what you can do to put your mind and your CFO’s mind at ease knowing that you maximized your investment.
How Do We Get the Most Out Of The Contact Center Platform We Have?
Many companies have made the shift from looking inward and asking, “what do we need to function?” Now they are asking “what do our customers and clients want?” Having an outward focus on customer satisfaction and the customer experience in the contact center after stabilizing the environment is a welcomed trend we have seen.
Instead of just making sure your agents can take a call, now the customer experience and CSAT are top of mind. Making sure you have technology that enables your contact center to deliver on your customer needs should be one of the many lenses you look through in your evaluation. We have found that there are underutilized functions in the CCaaS platform that are there to be discovered.
Chatbots are common or simple plug-ins on many platforms and app marketplaces. Customers are used to chatting with automated response chatbots and many of them prefer this. On-demand customer service has grown significantly since COVID-19 and so has the acceptance from all audiences.
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) or IVA (Interactive Virtual Agents) are quickly deployable options with all of the CCaaS leaders. Automation can cut call volume significantly, which helps with the labor shortage and consistency. There have been several instances where our clients had IVR capabilities built in as part of the platform they deployed during the pandemic and didn’t know. With the help of our amazing team, they were up and running in days.
How Can We Get More Out of Our Contact Center Staff?
We know that a better customer experience in the contact center starts with a better agent experience. The age of agent enablement has just begun and is only going to continue to evolve at a rapid pace. The platform that you deployed has plug-in abilities and integrations that can transform your agent experience.
When it comes to agent assistance or enabling an agent to perform at their peak ability, our contact center industry-leading partnerships play a key role in that success. Knowledge management has traditionally been a grassroots-level objective in spreading education and tribal knowledge within the organization. With companies like Replicant, Observe.ai, Shelf, and more innovating at lightning speed, agent assistance has no bounds within your organization.
The days of having agents sit idle waiting for calls means that you are wasting precious time and resources. Again, chances are more likely than not that your CCaaS solution has or can easily integrate with some form of workforce management platform. Anticipating staffing needs, peak call volumes, and even predicting the time-off needs of agents all come into play with WFM. If you do not have that deployed, you are not reaching your staff’s full potential.
This Is Exactly What We Do for Clients
Even before the pandemic, we were guiding contact center leaders to maximize their current technology. Of course, there has never been a hastier rush to deploy technology in history, so now we are having more of those discussions than ever. Many IT and contact center leaders are asking how to get the most out of their current contact center solution.
You should commend yourself on surviving an incredibly challenging time. When you are ready to go from surviving to thriving, InflowCX is ready to take your call and discuss how we can help your contact center get the most out of your people, processes, and technology.
