How well does your contact center software enable your organization to execute? This question is an important one, according to this Contactual (News - Alert) blog. Authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan pointed out in their book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done that execution is the ultimate difference between a successful company and its competitors.
If this is the case, then the latest marketing campaign you are set to launch to rejuvenate your place in the market and drive revenue will be a waste of time if it falls flat as a result of your contact center software. If this happens, your attempt to take worldwide distribution to a whole new level will fail; your plans to upsell to every customer on the phone will be null and void; and your strategy to become the leader in your space will stop before it starts all because your contact center was unable to execute.
How does this relate to your contact center? If you don’t have robust contact center software in place to be sure callers can get through, it won’t matter if you have the best marketing campaign ever launched. A contact center that is unable to scale quickly enough to meet increased demand and an on-premise system that is tapped out will leave your customers looking elsewhere for satisfaction.
Perhaps your callers can get through, but agents cannot access the data they need while on the phone to complete the upsell or cross-sell with the customer. Without tight integration between your contact center software and your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, your agents will be unable to access customer purchase histories and personal preferences that can trigger those upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
It is important that you have contact center software that provides key customer information at your agents’ fingertips or you will waste valuable time. In addition, the message you send to your customers is that you really don’t care about their business enough to locate information they have already provided to you. Your talk time then increases, as well as close rates, and the resulting revenues end up a fraction of what you anticipated in your campaign.
You can avoid this nightmare when you integration the right contact center software with your CRM. When you leverage this capability in a cloud-based contact center, you gain access to the latest innovations in technology available in the contact center space with just a click of the mouse.
Keep in mind that any cost associated with launching such an integrated and hosted platform is quickly negated by the absence of expensive hardware and software, as well as the negative situations your agents and your customers won’t experience.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Chris DiMarco