Contact centre functionality that can seamlessly be added to your UC to help boost efficiency and customer experience
In our last blog we looked at the questions you should ask to determine if your business is running one or more informal contact centres. If you answered yes and would like to know more about the benefits of adding contact centre technology to your informal contact centre, read on to find out the five essentials for informal contact centre success.
Five essentials for informal contact centre success
Formal contact centre functionality can easily be added to your informal contact centre. We’ve comprised five contact centre essentials that you might want to consider seamlessly adding to your informal contact centre to help boost your efficiency and customer experience.
1. Improve customer interactions with skill-based routing
If you have customers that require very specific information or have complex issues that need solving, then skills-based routing could be an option. Building long-term and lasting relationships is critical to any business and the longer a customer has spent being transferred to the right person or is waiting on hold, the harder it will be to have a meaningful conversation and ultimately retain that loyalty. Informal contact centres can often be siloed and calls can’t always be easily transferred to the right staff. Skill-based routing starts the conversation in the right vein by bringing customers to the staff member best qualified to help them and allows the informal contact centre to be more agile in the way they utilise staff.
2. Free up your time from running reports
Now could be an ideal time to look at how much potentially wasted time is being taken up manually creating and running reports. Adding traditional contact centre quality management reporting into your informal contact centre could significantly help you to free up valuable managers’ time to be focused on other elements of the job such as training, development and mentoring of employees. Regular reports can easily be automated and time taken to create ad-hoc or specialised reports can be greatly reduced with the right analytics tools in place.
3. Optimise your workforce and employee experience with Workforce Management tools
If your forecasting and planning is somewhat off the mark, perhaps at particularly busy times of the year for example, then perhaps it’s time you looked at how to drive better efficiencies within your informal contact centre set up. Many companies still use traditional Excel spreadsheets to help with forecasting and planning, which is fine up to a point, but can also bring with it a lot of inflexibility. Workforce Management tools allow you to have the right people, with the right skills, doing the right job at the right time! Workforce Management can also be integrated into your UC to enable you to get the most out of your staff by empowering them to manage their own schedules and workload and to drive efficiencies within your business.
4. Keep your customers happy by setting up SLA’s to measure satisfaction
In the informal contact centre, it’s not always top of mind to think about measuring your customer service metrics because your employees will more than likely be carrying out a number of tasks outside of answering the phone and dealing with customer queries. But, as we all know caring for your customers should never be neglected and one of the ways the informal contact centre can put measures in place for this is acting like the formal contact centre when it comes to your SLA’s.
5. Make it easy for customers to get in touch by introducing an omni-channel experience
Communications these days cover so many more touch points than the phone, and in today’s increasingly digital world, not all of your customers might want to call you! Instead, they might prefer to use other channels such as webchats, website FAQ’s, email or even social media. By providing a range of options for your customers to get in touch you can start to provide your customers with a seamless omni-channel experience to ensure you remain agile, relevant and fluid to adapt to their needs in these rapidly changing times.
