The informal contact centre isn’t new, yet many businesses don’t see themselves as such. In an increasingly digital world where customer experience and employee experience is now more important than ever. Read on to learn what an informal contact centre typically looks like and why adding Contact Centre functionality to your Unified Communications could help boost your employee and customer experience.
What is an informal contact centre?
When asked, ‘Does your organisation have a contact centre?’ many companies might answer ‘no. The truth is, many who answered ‘no’ do actually have at least one if not more ‘informal contact centres’ that are operating within the business.
We’re all familiar with the formal contact centre set up – often consisting of large groups of agents wearing headsets and dedicated to answering a high volume of customer interactions each day, often fairly repetitively.
Informal contact centres often exist within a business but aren’t the sole purpose of the business. Â If you have a team of employees that are responding to and assisting with internal or external incoming communications or requests from customers, this is an informal contact centre.
Whereas formal contact centre agents are usually trained to do one job on a volume basis, the employees in the ‘informal contact centre’ situation typically get more involved with a range of tasks and requests that are non-repetitive, often more complex and not measured in the same way that an agent in the formal contact centre situation would be.
An example of an informal contact could be a help desk set up to solve a broad range of requests each day, but to also perform a broader range of other more complex tasks as part of the job remit. Informal contact centre employees could be IT workers, finance or human resources specialists, account or case managers or any kind of subject matter expert. Informal call centre workers are not ‘dedicated’ agents and usually have other tasks to perform each day outside of processing and handling customer queries.
How can I tell if I have an informal contact centre?
If you answer yes to any of the points below there is a high chance you have an informal contact centre and might benefit from some of the contact centre tools and technologies that are available.
- Do you have groups of workers that receive frequent phone calls either on a regular basis or at certain times of the year?
- Do you need to deliver a contractual Service Level Agreement to customers?
- Do calls into your business require fast and efficient action and response times?
- Do you have employees such as sales, service or technical support personnel that handle multiple incoming service requests on a daily basis?
- Do your staff often need to prioritise incoming calls?
- Do calls coming into your business need to meet compliancy requirements in some way?
- Do you have subject experts who need to be called upon to deal with more complex or high value transactions?
- Do call volumes often fluctuate at certain times of the day or at certain points in the year?
- Do you need visibility of what transactions have taken place with a customer historically in order to effectively deal with a call coming in from that customer?
Why adding contact centre to your unified communications could boost your employee and customer experience
Businesses that fall into the informal contact centre bracket and only operate using unified communications need to determine whether this UC is enough on its own in our increasingly digital world or if employees who frequently interact with customers could benefit from being able to access some contact centre functionality.
Let Opus help you transform your informal contact centre
If you’d like to review your informal contact centre functionality, why not get in touch with us to see how we can help you transform your operations to drive better efficiency and above all else customer experience. Working with industry leading contact centre experts like 8×8, Cirrus and Gamma we can help you take small steps to gradually evolve your UC functionality over time or we can help you with a complete rehaul to fully streamline your communications.
