The contact center today has evolved from that old standby of years ago, the ‘call center.’ With today’s technology, customers not only have myriad ways of reaching out, but they can also torpedo your efforts and reputation with a few well-paced tweets.
As such, it’s incumbent on all contact centers to stay on top of their game at all times. To that end, Reuben Yonatan (News - Alert), founder of cloud communications advisor GetVoIP, posted a blog recently outlining what he described as the Top Five features every good contact center should have. They’re worth noting with an explainer on why Yonatan feels each one is necessary.
Social Media Integration: “Social Media is the digital hearth. Until the days of radio and later television, people would crowd around the fireplace and talk about their day,” Yonatan says. “Now they do it with their phones. Everyone can talk, everyone can listen. A modern call center has software that can monitor mentions of their name on social media and alert the team.”
Predictive Dialers: “According to some estimates, 10-25 percent of the time an agent spends on the phone is dealing with dead time. A predictive dialer is the best way to get that time back,” he says. “And although it's a little tough to quantify things like frustration and boredom, there's no question that it's good for morale for agents to spend more time succeeding and less time idle.”
‘Unified Agent’ Workforce: The unified agent workforce lets a supervisor follow the agents' interactions with the clients in real time, and then keeps detailed records that the supervisor and agent can review later. Yonatan says, “This means you can use a large amount of data to see trends and identify areas that need special attention, and then go as granular as an individual call to pinpoint a specific example.” It’s an invaluable option.
WebRTC Video and Voice Features: If you talk to any help desk, especially where technology and electronics are involved, there are some pretty basic steps the consumer goes through that the agent has to smile, grit her teeth, and get through. These are basic things like whether an option in a menu is turned on or off, or even if something is plugged in correctly. By using video, the operator can actually ‘see’ the problem firsthand.
Workforce Management Dashboards: The dashboard displays the data in a way that it can be easily understood. “Data is displayed in both real time as it is collected, and then aggregated and analyzed later,” Yonatan notes. “The screen is populated with user-friendly charts and graphs that make it easy for the agent to understand her own performance. The manager, meanwhile, can have a more macro view of everyone's data to understand what areas need attention.”
Simple is as simple does. By keeping an eye on these five suggestions, your call center can become the true face of your company.
Edited by Eric Adams