Deliver exceptional customer experiences - every single time.
What used to be known as a call center where agents either made or accepted customer calls has today grown to include interacting with customers when, where, and how they choose. From phone to chat to social media and other channels, the contact center is being shaped by digital innovation and customer demand. Businesses must evolve or be left in the analog age battling for customer retention.
Contact center agents rely on a wide range of technology to handle both inbound and outbound customer communications. These enable organizations to more quickly and easily address and solve client needs, and include:
- Contact Center Software - There are various solutions on the market for organizations of all sizes to help manage and route incoming communications like calls, texts, and chats to the agents who are best trained to resolve them. This can include to agents with certain skill sets or those who speak specific languages.
- Interactive Voice Responsive (IVR) System - Commonly known as a "phone tree," an IVR enables callers to use the keypad or voice prompts to identify and route themselves to the best contact for issue resolution. You don't want to end up in technical support if you called in to pay a bill.
- Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) System - For sales and support organizations, an ACD system enables them to manage incoming calls based on specific instructions. Calls can be validated and forwarded, incoming callers can record messages, and contact center agents can make outgoing responses or calls, among other tasks.
- TTY/TDD System - Contact centers use TTY (TeleTYpe)/TDD (Telecommunications Device for the Deaf) systems to assist deaf or hard-of-hearing customers who use text-based telecommunications equipment. This technology can also assist contact center agents, opening up a world of opportunity for them in the job market.
- Workforce Management System - With changing workforce needs due to variable interaction volumes and duration, staffing contact centers can sometimes be an issue. Using a workforce management system, contact center managers can monitor high-volume contact and call times and schedule staff appropriately.
These solutions can be delivered a number of ways, a cloud-based contact center, a hosted contact center, or a mix of the two, a hybrid contact center. With modern contact center software, businesses of all sizes can easily scale and add omnichannel functionality as their organization grows and their needs change.
Contact centers provide a critical function for organizations that want to improve the customer experience. As customers look to connect with companies when and how they want to resolve customer service issues large and small, the ability to quickly and easily handle these requests should be a top priority. Today, it's not enough to simply have call center functionality, your business should offer a true omnichannel experience for all customers and ensure that you have customers for life.