The stakes are higher than ever before for the contact center industry. Customers are becoming more demanding, expecting instant results and high levels of first-call resolution. At the same time, technology budgets haven’t expanded much – if at all – for most organizations in many years. For some companies, notably financial services and insurance companies, whose services are very commoditized and customer loyalty is often low, the pinch between budget and customer demands is even more extreme.
Many companies have responded by moving to virtual contact center technology, which allows a high level of flexibility for contact centers to use home-based and remote agents, to add cutting-edge self-service technologies and call routing capabilities, and to analyze operations all day, every day, so they can anticipate customers’ needs and try to meet them with a minimum of expense.
VoltDelta (News - Alert) is one of the companies many organizations have turned to for virtual contact center solutions. VoltDelta’s OnDemand’s virtual contact center technology and voice self-service IVR on demand solutions allow call center managers to proactively enhance customer care in the face of budget cuts or staff reductions (sometimes both!)
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These solutions can be deployed with minimum upfront expense, unlike premise-based solutions, and can expand or contract as the call center’s needs dictate, without wasted licenses. According to VoltDelta, automated voice recognition and messaging applications deployed without capital expenditures means applications can be quickly put to work, with calls immediately answered and serviced without agent assistance. This helps save contact centers money and manpower while still keeping customer service quality high and outcomes positive.
Intelligent call routing ensures that calls are sent to the right place every time, automatically, which reduces the need for transfers or customers waiting on hold. Satisfaction verification uses call recording and reporting to keep track of the “voice of the customer” and make sure standards of service remain high.
By properly integrating live agents and intelligent automation, virtual call centers can be sure they are using as much automation as is required to handle the call properly, while also making sure customers receive the personal touch of a live agent. Customer service calls can be transferred to an agent along with a screen pop and a call recording of the voice recognition sequence, ensuring that the agent is prepared and ready to go as soon as the call is picked up, which saves valuable time.
Most companies that believed in cutting quality of service in the call center in the face of an economic downturn found out the hard way that they were wrong: they lost customers. By keeping costs under control and boosting call handling quality at the same time, organizations can be winners on both the financial and quality of service fronts.
Edited by Blaise McNamee