VoIP Contact Center Solutions Help Customer Support Organizations Cope with the Holidays

As retailers ramp up for the both dreaded and anticipated holiday shopping season, they have a number of choices to make. Since a significant portion of their sales are made at this time of year, logic follows that more customers than any other time of year come through their contact centers. Some of these are likely to be new customers, and how the calls are handled – the quality of customer support offered – will determine whether these new customers become loyal return customers or one-time wonders.

While no one wants to bring too many temporary customer support personnel online to handle the extra volume, the risks of understaffing at this time of year are far more considerable. Understaffing can lead to long hold times, frazzled agents, mistakes made in transactions, little to no first-call resolution and poor customer satisfaction rates. Many calls may wind up being abandoned, with prospective customers never calling back again, leading to a considerable number of lost sales. On the other hand, overstaffing is expensive and can eat away at a significant portion of holiday revenue, not to mention lead to bored, disengaged agents and potentially high turnover.

Many companies choose to bring business process outsourcing (BPO) partners online to handle extra holiday volume and overflow calls. While this is a good choice for many retailers, smaller organizations may simply not be able to afford it. They also might be concerned about the quality of service offered by a third party.

The dilemma has caused many customer support organizations to get smart with their technology to offer them more flexibility with holiday volume and schedules. For many customer-facing organizations, cloud-based voice over IP (VoIP) systems can go a long way toward helping companies handle extra communications demands and unite the customer support team.

According to a recent article by Lisa Stapleton writing for Business2Community, the best systems start with advanced business phone service and go all the way up to multi-featured virtual contact centers solutions that have many advantages over standard telephone service, premise-based contact center solutions and old-fashioned PBXs.

“First, a good VoIP system has a flexible, online interface that lets you set up and change the routing of your calls at will,” writes Stapleton. “You can literally see what’s happening with your phones and turn on a dime when necessary.”

This offers customer support organizations flexibility to configure the contact center in any way that best suits their needs: they can put agents on their days off “on call” to log in and handle calls from their homes, or they can pull workers from other departments or even workers on the road into the contact center virtually to handle more complex calls about billing or returns, for example. They can run multisite contact centers that allow them to serve more time zones and provide overflow support for one another. Best of all, they can ensure that a weather-related event won’t sink their holiday business, since agents can log in and work from anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Another challenge to the holiday season is managing schedules for time-off while ensuring that the schedule is built (and adhered to) in a way that ensures coverage despite the holiday changes. Stapleton also notes that the easy manageability of VoIP really helps companies communicate fast-changing adjustments to holiday schedules—without missing out on holidays or festivities.

VoIP contact center solutions providers such as ShoreTel (News - Alert) offer flexible solutions for organizations of all sizes: from smaller, less formal environments to large organizations requiring multimedia, sophisticated routing, enhanced reporting options, self-service and outbound campaign capabilities.

By building a virtual contact center environment with support for the leading customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise management applications, companies are better able to deploy a complete, integrated contact center solution that meets unique and changing business requirements and allows for multisite operations that can help customer support organizations scale as necessary to meet rising demand (such as is often required during the holiday season). A feature-rich solution can also help them pursue the kind of customer engagement that, when offered at the holidays, creates repeat customers for life.

Companies can pinpoint their operations down to the level of single phone calls to determine what’s working and what’s not. ShoreTel’s tools for managers enable customized real-time and historical reports to be generated to meeting changing business requirements, for both measures across all forms of customer contact, including inbound and outbound multichannel customer applications. With real-time reporting, busy contact center managers can keep an eye on the state of the contact center and make changes on the fly to ensure that service levels are being met and customer calls aren’t being dropped or given the short-shrift.

The holidays shouldn’t be a nightmare … for anyone (although the people working retail jobs on Black Friday (News - Alert) might disagree). For contact centers, they should represent considerable opportunity, as long as they are properly equipped to take advantage of them.