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Hosted Contact Center Solutions Help Organizations Meet Customer Expectations

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

While many companies haven’t changed the way they offer customer service in years or even decades, customers themselves are ever-changing. This presents a problem for many companies, who are offering 1990s customer service to 2014 customers.

Customers today expect to be able to use multiple channels, including mobile and social media. They expect to be able to use multiple channels sometimes for the same transaction, with no loss of information. They expect an always-available agents with no long hold times (or at least the ability to request a call-back if queues are long). They expect the right information every time they reach out, and they don’t like to repeat themselves. More than anything else, they expect the transactions they initiate to be easy.

Today, hosted contact center solutions are helping many companies achieve these goals. True, integrated and scalable multichannel and “omnichannel” contact center structures are virtually impossible to achieve with premise-based solutions…not without forking over huge amounts of capital for infrastructure, IT and consulting, anyway.

Here are some of the ways hosted solutions can help companies service the customers of today, according to a recent blog post by Chip Bell writing for ICMI.

Don’t make them repeat themselves. If a customer is reaching out a second time (or third) in a short period of time, he or she wants you to know that. Customers get angry when they’re expected to recount their recent transactions to a company that should have a record of them. Ensure that every time agents pick up a contact from a customer, they have the customer’s entire history available to them in an easy-to-read and comprehend manner.

Make it easy. Customers today are very protective of their time, and they believe any company that wants their business should also value the customer’s time. Studies have shown that the companies that make it effortless for customers to do business with them win. This means there should be no roadblocks, silos or other “you can’t get there from here” moments in the customer experience.

“Customers are today far less tolerant of wait time, processes that only benefit the organization, and broken promises,” writes Bell. “Take an empathy walk through your customer’s experience and notice all the places on their journey where effort can be eliminated or minimized.”

Wow the customers with things they didn’t expect. It takes a lot to stand out today, so providing a “good enough” experience may not do it.

“Today’s customers want sparkly and glitter; a cherry on top of everything,” writes Bell. “They want all their senses stimulated.  Features have become far more titillating than function; extras more valued than the core offering.  It means attracting customer loyalty today requires viewing customer service as an attraction.  Think of the service experience like Cracker Jacks.  What can be your ‘free prize inside?’” 

While the cloud was initially conceived simply as a way to save money, it has become far more than that today for the average contact center. Hosted contact center solutions have become a way for smaller organizations to compete with – or even exceed – the quality of service offered by larger players.