Five Contact Centre Features to Assist Agent Productivity

Here are the top five contact centre features to assist agent productivity and enhance customer support.

1. Intelligent Virtual Assistants automate and streamline customer interactions

Intelligent Virtual Assistants are a feature of contact centre technology that utilises artificial intelligence and natural language processing to enable self-service and automate customer interactions across voice and digital channels.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) act as virtual customer service agents that handle a variety of routine customer enquiries and tasks such as checking account balances, updating delivery information, or processing transactions. IVAs can provide instant responses to multiple customer enquiries simultaneously, without the need for them to wait in a queue or be transferred to an agent. This immediate availability and scalability of IVAs ensure that customers’ needs are addressed promptly, reducing waiting times, and enabling agents to dedicate their attention to more critical or complex interactions.

2. Email Management solutions consolidate interactions and enable a unified approach to customer support

Many contact centres work from shared mailboxes within Microsoft 365 or Gmail. The core limitations to this approach include having to manually assign conversations, emails being missed or duplicating responses to customers and there being no single view of the customer, which potentially doubles the cost to serve a customer as teams may be working in silos. On top of this, it is not possible to deliver an SLA, it takes an increased amount of time to handle enquiries and reporting simply doesn’t exist. By using email management solutions as part of your contact centre technology, you can deliver different media types in a consolidated queue and remove data and team silos.

3. Omni-Channel Contact Centres give customers the choice to communicate from their preferred platform

An omnichannel contact centre allows agents to talk with customers on different platforms, like Facebook Messenger, SMS, voice, email, webchat and more. This means that customers can choose how they talk to your business, leading to a higher level of customer satisfaction through channel choice and a more personalised experience. All conversations are synced across channels, making it easy for agents to know what has been discussed before and provide better assistance. Unlike a traditional call centre, where only one voice conversation can be handled at a time, an omnichannel contact centre enables agents to have multiple conversations simultaneously across several channels resulting in increased productivity and the capacity to handle a greater number of interactions.

4. Agent Assist supports agents to be more effective and improves customer service

Agent Assist is an artificial intelligence tool that transcribes conversations in real-time and offers suggestions, recommendations, and guidance during customer interactions. It analyses the conversation and provides agents with relevant information, responses and cross-selling or upselling suggestions. This helps agents handle interactions more efficiently and reduces training time significantly. agent Assist also provides information from the knowledge base, ensuring that customers receive accurate and consistent information without the agent having to search for answers or consult documentation. With this access to contextual information, an agent’s average handling time is significantly reduced and their productivity is boosted.

5. CRM Integration delivers a single pane of glass, enabling the agent to focus on the conversation

Integration of CRM data with your contact centre technology enables agents to access comprehensive customer profiles, including previous interactions, purchase history, and preferences. Having a complete view of the customer in one place helps agents to provide personalised and relevant support, leading to quicker issue resolution and higher customer satisfaction. CRM integration allows agents to access customer information within a single system and eliminates the need to switch between different systems. This streamlined workflow reduces the time spent searching for information and navigating between applications, enabling agents to handle customer queries more efficiently.

From handling routine processes and automating responses to consolidating the agent view and providing an omnichannel experience for the customer, there are numerous Contact Centre solutions that assist agent productivity. As the only Managed Service Provider in the UK to have been awarded the ServiceMark accreditation from the Institute of Customer Service, Opus pride themselves on delivering an outstanding customer experience with our state-of-the-art market-leading Contact Centre portfolio.