The modern contact centre is available to businesses now. And for those that are utilising the myriad of features available, it’s delivering enormous value. In fact, a 2023 Forrester study found that companies that focus on customer experience can achieve revenue growth 4-8% higher than their competitors. For businesses that are investing in their tech setup and want to modernise their contact centre, they need to ensure they have a robust and complete set of tools to support their customer engagement infrastructure, otherwise they risk being one step behind.
A snapshot of the modern contact centre
To be effective for the needs of customers and businesses, contact centres need to have some key features. Specifically, a contact centre must embody the following elements:
1. Understanding the customer journey
Every facet of the contact centre must be focused on the needs of people – both agents and customers– and be able to flex to specific needs of every interaction. Critical to this, is delivering an omnichannel experience that is unified and integrated across business units. This means a consistent service across any – or all – of the channels utilised, whether that’s the phone, web chat or email, amongst others.
Contact centre managers are able to implement features like skills-based routing, meaning that staff that are more adept at engaging on different channels, or solving specific situational queries, can automatically receive the more relevant customer interactions.
2. Smart and AI-ready
AI has become the buzzword of the era and is ingrained as a core element in technology as its applications become more widespread and use in the contact centre is no different. For instance, when integrated in the right way AI can offer enhanced and automated responses to customer queries, regardless of their complexity. Sourcing the required information from a pool of historic customer information.
Tools like Gen-AI chatbots can handle routine tasks like password resets and data lookups, enhancing self-service for customers and saving valuable time for agents. When fully integrated into your CX setup, these chatbots can seamlessly transfer to human agents, including chat history and suggested solutions, when human support is needed.
3. Effective and measurement focused
Targets – and hitting those targets – are a fundamental part of every contact centre. However, it’s important to move beyond stagnant KPIs. Having access to more precise measurement statistics around engagement times, quality of interactions, and customer delivery gives managers improved understanding of individual and overall performance. In addition, analysing these metrics can reveal wider business trends and guide necessary decision making.
4. Built for the future
With a pressure to account for every pound spent, any investment needs to demonstrate long-term impact and value. Revamping technology now, only to replace it entirely in a few years’ time when it becomes redundant, isn’t a move that will help boost consistent growth. This is one of the areas where cloud-based technology shows its clear competitive advantage.
So, what should contact centre managers be looking for in their next cloud provider? It’s imperative that managers are looking at what the focus areas, priorities, and product roadmaps for the next 5-10 years are from these cloud providers to ensure they are aligned. After all, with the advancement of AI, there’s still an element of uncertainty, but cloud technology unlocks a dynamic approach to planning for the future.
What this delivers for businesses
The benefits of embodying these attributes are far-reaching. Productivity is widely cited as a key impact. By integrating advanced tools and features, businesses can simplify the complexity of customer engagement, streamlining activity and boosting outcomes. In addition, with easy resolution for customers and agents alike, everyone involved in the process has a better experience – increasing customer happiness and employee retention.
The modern contact centre isn’t a pipedream, it’s a reality. Only with investment in the right tech can the benefits be unlocked.
