No matter what industry your business operates in, your goal should be to deliver a great experience for your customers and employees. If you operate a contact centre, you need to empower your agents to deliver seamless customer journeys and build lasting relationships, across multiple points of interaction.
Small to medium businesses (SMEs) who operate contact centres have the inherent advantage of adaptability, but they also have some unique challenges in keeping pace with ever changing customer demands and balancing these with budgetary constraints and operational scalability. That is, until now.
The emergence of cloud-based contact centre solutions offer affordable, fully featured and scalable options for SMEs that can help solve those challenges.
Here’s a look at the top challenges and how a cloud contact centre can address them.
1. Empowering agents with the right tools and real-time feedback
Contact centres are becoming increasingly important. More people working from home need different tools. In today’s complex environment with increasing expectations of performance and results, agent performance can suffer if they aren’t empowered to do their best. The right technology can help.
It starts with automating as much as possible to remove the mundane tasks, teamed with near real-time feedback providing insights and enabling rapid feedback and coaching. When combined with smart tools that streamline ongoing training, you can create a dynamic environment that improves agent satisfaction and reduces delays that can cause stress in the environment.
2. Keeping agents engaged and reducing attrition
SME contact centres feel the financial pain from agent turnover. Often, insufficient training, unsatisfactory work environments — stress, repetition overload, scheduling challenges — outdated or overly complex software systems with rework and manual intervention add to the burden of having to deal with frustrated customers are reasons for employee turnover.
Workforce optimisation tools that support better forecasting, scheduling and assignment rotation, can help to avoid stress and burnout. An omnichannel platform that lets customers use their preferred channels with self-service options creates happier customers. Your agents can view and access information across multiple channels in the same session. This creates happier employees.
3. Rationalisation and convergence of disparate technologies
If front and back-office systems aren’t connected on the same platform, collecting and analysing data is difficult. Without clear evidence and feedback, it’s difficult to understand what good looks and sounds like, so many SMEs miss key performance indicators and those triggers that indicate trends. Insights from your customer conversations are missed, feedback masked as complaints can cause problems at a later time and introduces delays and unnecessary manual intervention to achieve smooth operational cadence.
Introducing smarter options and integrating technologies that automate processes to support seamless omnichannel customer journeys, reduce operational costs, manage employee performance and help meet key regulatory and quality indicators.
4. Inconsistent customer experiences
When customer experience matters, the limitations of disparate and legacy contact centres lead to inconsistent customer experience. Creating an amazing experience requires organisation, planning, and setting up your infrastructure and workforce to deliver extraordinary services. An omnichannel platform delivers the necessary infrastructure; and workforce management tools put the knowledge and instruments at agents’ fingertips to answer customer questions and follow up, as required.
5. Technology
Siloed technologies and an inflexible infrastructure limit your ability to deliver a great customer experience. If your customers can’t switch seamlessly between their preferred channels or if agents can’t see their contact history, everyone ends up frustrated. And when you can’t scale easily to meet demand, you lose business and waste valuable resources.
An omnichannel, cloud-based platform delivers a complete customer engagement and communication solution, enabling you to provide the experience your customers demand.
6. Demands on the IT department
Effective contact centres often rely heavily on IT, particularly if your legacy platform limits a manager’s ability to update customer service rules. This can cause delays. An example may be that you submit a ticket to IT … and then you wait … and wait … as well as being a nuisance, it’s an unnecessary expense. This makes your contact centre less agile and means that IT has less time to work on issues that add value to the business.
An updated software solution puts IT in control when needed. But contact centre managers can leverage simple and intuitive tools that deliver the agility they need when they need it.
7. Making every contact count
Renowned management consultant, Peter Drucker, famously said “ You can’t manage what you can’t measure…”. So, it’s nearly impossible to deliver the best customer experience without insights into the customer journey or agent performance. Contact centres need analytics and dynamic reporting. The right software can unlock actionable insights from every interaction, across every channel – making every contact count.
8. Management buy-in and budget
In every business, the demand for across the board efficiencies and cost containment is increasing. This means that often, requests for additional staff or upgraded technology can fall on deaf ears. It’s critical for management teams to understand the contact centre’s role in driving customer experience and improving ROI. Often management thinks of the contact centre solely as a “necessary expense.” The right software platform will demonstrate how your contact centre serves as a profit centre — not an ongoing cost drain. Without it, you’ll struggle to solve many common issues.
Enter the Cloud Contact Centre
With the emergence of cloud contact centre solutions (such as GenesysCloud), SMEs are no longer challenged by high barriers of cost and/or scale to get the features they need and their customer expect.
GSN pioneered the Cloud Contact Centre in Australia in 2003. We continue to deliver innovative solutions to Australian businesses. If the challenges above sound familiar, start by speaking with the team at GSN today. Our local team of experts can help you define a solution that meets your needs today and will scale to meet your needs as things change.
Our team is exceptionally talented and dedicated to customer success. To every one of our team, every customer is our most important customer.
No matter where you are with your contact centre journey, we can help.
