Customers have the ability to choose the most efficient method of customer service interaction. Whether inquiries are generated via phone, e-mail, fax, Web chat or SMS, contact center agents must be able to control every contact within their customer interaction environment. 

Today, phone calls are the most predominant form of interaction in a contact center, as over 80 percent of interactions with customers are phone calls, even though more communications have been emerging.

Zeacom (News - Alert), a provider of multichannel contact center and business process automation solutions, has put a great deal of focus phone calls as a truly effective and efficient means of customer interaction. Zeacom Communication Center (ZCC) has recently been integrated into Avaya (News - Alert) IP Office phone systems worldwide.

The Zeacom IP Office integration has made phone calls into the contact center even better. What exactly does better mean? A lot of things, according to John Cray, director of product management at Zeacom.

“It means that we can offer self-service. When a customer comes in we can give them an IVR script that asks them basic questions and can hopefully address their problem without having to go to a live agent. If you can cut down the number of calls going to live agents, then you’ve saved a lot of money,” Cray explained in a recent interview with TMCnet.

If the call does have to go to a live agent, the contact center must make sure that agent has the right skills needed to address that call. When it comes to abandoned calls (where a person is sitting on hold and eventually hangs up), for a lot of contact centers, there is no way to regain that customer interaction.

But with Zeacom, you can offer the customer a choice to wait on hold or hang up and get a call back from the contact center. “You won’t lose your position and you don’t have to hold,” added Cray. “It’s the way to turn a potentially unhappy customer into a delighted customer.”

With Zeacom IP Office, when the call does get directed to a live agent, that agent is able to see the customer record and see what they’re calling about in advance. In fact, on average in the U.S., it takes about 23 seconds per call to validate the caller’s identity, noted Cray.

“If you can do all of that before you get to the agent, you are saving 23 seconds per call, which is an incredible amount of efficiency gain,” he said.  

There are also many other productivity tools like allowing the agent conference in other people who might be experts in the customer’s issue and collaborate with them while still on the phone. According to Cray, this is a huge gain in first call resolution.

“There is a lot of power in that – the power to deliver great customer service,” he commented.

Aside from phone calls, these days about 11 to 12 percent of contact center interactions are done via e-mail. Interestingly, almost 90 percent of contact centers now have to handle e-mails from their customers.

“Customers are demanding it. They have e-mail everywhere. It has become by far the second most common way of interacting with a call center, but customers won’t use it if you don’t respond in a relatively quick time frame,” he explained.

E-mails have a lot of benefits in a contact center. For instance, you can handle them in off peak times. Using a universal queue, which Zeacom and IP Office together have, you can basically have the e-mails queued up just as though they are calls and distributed to the appropriately skilled agent, and then have the same tools available to get customer information.

These days, performance is everything – to outperform your competition you need to constantly review your business practices. You can then report both phone calls and e-mails in one universal, consolidated framework.

You can capture the metrics that are important to you, quickly, so you can act on them.

“You can tell how agents are performing, how quickly they are dealing with customers, how long the contact center is making customers wait,” he said. “You can tell that information by queue, by agent, by agent group, and a number of other different ways, and in real time.”

One of Zeacom’s tools called Snapshot allows you to see what is going on right now. The agents don’t have to be sitting all in one place – they can be distributed throughout the building, working at home, etc., but I can still see all that information.

In addition, an emerging trend is that the social media networks are monitored looking for what people are saying about your products. Then, when you see something on social media network, you want to react to it right away. By monitoring that information, you can allow those interactions to also be queued into the contact center and then dealt with by the agents.

Cray concluded, “It’s all about making communications work for your organization in the best possible way so that customers are delighted and happy so that you are productive at a reasonable cost.”