Contact center technology can be the nerve center of your organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. Depending on the services offered, the contact center can also be called a call center, service desk, or customer service department. Automating and streamlining your customer experience will bring considerable benefits to your organization. Likewise, outsourcing the process and will get massive savings to your organization.
The advent of contact center technology solutions allows companies to reach out to customers in new ways. While contact centers have been around for a while, contact center technology makes the services more affordable and accessible for businesses of all sizes.
This article explains contact center technology and the various types that deliver quality service and improve business processes. First, we’ll cover what exactly contact center technology refers to and the different features it offers. Also, a list of some effective contact center solutions can help you support your customers efficiently and affordably.
What Is Contact Center Technology?
Contact center technology is a broad category. To begin with, contact centers offer a contact base a service, product, support, or the company itself. Technologically speaking, contact centers can span applications and platforms that use phones, hardware, cloud-based servers, and more. Contact center technology encompasses all those tools and technologies used by the contact center teams to communicate with customers over the phone. Specifically, this technology ranges from automated call routing and call recording to call distribution across groups and campaigns.
Businesses can use contact center technology to facilitate or improve customer experience, increase productivity, or both. For instance, you could set up a phone line that allows people to initiate contact when calling out for PTO, sick, COVID, or FMLA. Your organization might also implement a toll-free number with automated greetings and pre-recorded solutions on your website to enable self-service inquiries. These forms of contact are more convenient for the customer, which helps simplify their experience. While increasing communications with customers via technology can make them happier, it has another excellent benefit. It reduces the need for live agents to handle calls all the time. This is important to ensure affordable solutions for your business.
Advanced Contact Center Technology for Call Forwarding and On-Call Management.
We’ve all experienced what is known as call forwarding, the ability to forward your business calls to another number during non-business hours. It’s convenient for both you and your callers. Your callers know that if they can’t reach you directly, their call will be forwarded to the alternative number of your choice, so there’s never an excuse for leaving a voicemail.
On-call management can be handled either via the web or through special software with your contact center partner. It is highly beneficial if you need to be out of the office for an extended period, either business or pleasure. In addition, you get coverage from colleagues if you manage emergencies or have technicians handling overnight requests.
These two solutions use the same technologies to ensure that your callers are supported and quickly get the help they need. For instance, each call you receive with Call Experts can be forwarded to a different extension or phone number based on a pre-determined schedule that you can set online. Also, if you prefer, our agents can take a message and send it to the designated person on your team. Finally, our contact center technology automates this entire process. Want to learn more? Contact us.
Call Forwarding, and On-Call Scheduling allows your team to configure forwarding destinations, protocols, alerts, and pre-loaded schedules to improve business processes while creating the ideal customer experience.
Advanced Contact Center Technology for Reporting.
Contact center reporting, as a discipline, is no longer a numbers game alone. Today it is a mix of technologies and techniques that focus on achieving a single end: real-time reporting that provides the most actionable insights possible from available data. By approaching reporting from this perspective, contact centers can begin to change those things that genuinely need changing within an organization—the productivity of the workforce, call length, average handle time, and customer satisfaction. Using advanced technologies, a contact center can help you understand employee, caller, and customer trends related to decision making, buyer preferences, and more.
The fact is that the contact center is rich with information. It collects it at every stage, from sales and marketing to sales, service, and support. This data can be the most significant opportunity for creating a robust reporting environment that serves your entire organization, not just the people who run the center.
Suppose your goal is to deliver quality service to customers while minimizing costs. Advanced contact center technology for reporting will drive higher performance and productivity. Even with the growing complexity of contact centers and channels, the right tools will unlock incredible value.
Advanced Contact Center Technology for Call Routing With IVR.
We live in the digital age! When was the last time you called customer support or requested information? Chances are, in this modern world, you probably prefer to type out text messages or use chat. Sure, there might be reasons for calling, but these are few and far between. When was the last time you even used your landline phone? Most people prefer to communicate via technology.
Still, many businesses have grown accustomed to a world in which a phone number is synonymous with an actual person who can answer questions and resolve customer issues. So what is the best of both worlds? The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology acts as a switchboard for an organization’s telephone network, handling all incoming calls and funneling callers into the proper departments. In addition, IVR lets callers interact directly with the phone system when they call.
Callers can take “virtual branches” at any time (imagine a choose-your-own-adventure book). And as they do, they navigate further down your company’s virtual call tree. This makes it easy to customize each branch, such as sending callers to the correct department, handling self-service information, and handoff calls to available agents.
For example, callers can get directed to the correct department or access self-service information — no need for an agent. Unlike auto attendants, IVR systems are speech-based, or touch-tone activated and provided a seamless way for customers to reach relevant information quickly and easily by handling tasks that would take longer with an agent. Businesses need approachability to thrive in the digital age, and the best way to achieve this is by implementing an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology.
What Is the Future of Contact Center Technology in the Business World?
Contact center technology is changing the landscape of business. Over the past several years, cloud-based solutions have completely transformed the way companies handle customer service. Not only does cloud technology allow managers to manage their workforce better, but its efficiency is brutal for brick-and-mortar locations to match.
The future of the contact center is not all in-person. Instead, contact centers will be a blend of live agents and virtual technologies. Today, there’s a wide range of contact center technology solutions in the marketplace. Contact center technology disrupts traditional business models, allowing companies to escape late-night customer service requests, office politics, and time zone differences. In some companies, especially large corporations, different departments have their contact centers – marketing, sales, technical support, etc. The growth of cloud-based contact center technology will enable companies to run all of their businesses from a central remote location, wherever they happen to be located around the globe.
Call centers are an integral part of almost every company’s strategy moving forward. As a result, businesses using this technology are more profitable, innovative, and productive.
