How To Spot An Opportunity To Improve Your Contact Center Operations....Efficiency And Effectiveness

A contact center is an integrated, and usually automated, communications system that coordinates all telephone and electronic contacts between an organization and the public. The goal when talking about contact centers has always been to connect your business to your customer. Some of the questions you should consider as a business with a contact center are:

• What do you want your business to look like?
• How do you want your business to be perceived?
• How will people talk to you? Who should they talk to? How do you connect them?
• How do you measure your effectiveness?

HOW TO SPOT AN OPPORTUNITY FOR IMPROVEMENT TO YOUR CONTACT CENTER OPERATIONS

Customer experience has become the new battleground for competitive differentiation. When you look at customer needs they involve social media, self-service, mobility, texts, chats and email. These are all newer methods of communication, not usually associated with call centers, but nowadays call centers are really contact centers. In the past businesses have competed through products and pricing, but they now find themselves having to compete through service. One of the key factors for a business is the need to be able to interact with its customers in a manner which makes the customer want to interact with them. Therefore, the cloud contact center industry is expected to grow within the next three to five years as more businesses start to move into the cloud in order to be able to offer the features, functionality, and the type of customer experience their customers are demanding.

If you are unsure whether you have a contact centers with opportunities to improve operations, or if you don’t know what an opportunity looks like, the tips listed below will help you. 

• Most contact centers will have an 800 number, and this will be one of the easier ways to find out if there is a functioning contact center behind your business. By simply calling the number you will be able to figure out what what your functionality looks like, feels like, and if it makes sense. If the logic and the routing makes sense to you then you are most likely in good shape, but if it is confusing to you just imagine how it would be for a regular customer who is not technically inclined.
• If your business has a website, specially with chat or email functionality, that is another sign a contact center exists with an opportunity to improve.
• If your business uses a large amount of bandwidth it's likely Your existing contact center consumes a good portion of that...this is another opportunity for improvement.

Some other tips to consider when evaluating your contact centers for improvement:

• Contact centers are more of a business outcome discussion. This mean you will want to have this discussion with somebody in the C-Level or someone who is in operations.
• Always remember that moving contact centers to the cloud is a business culture, economic, and business outcome decision.
• If during your discussions you find you are moving other items to the cloud, the contact center might make a compelling argument supporting shift to the cloud.
• With AVAYA filing for chapter 11, there are a lot of businesses who are nervous about this and what it means. Many businesses might have antiquated AVAYA architecture in this premise space, so moving off of a premise system and into the cloud makes more sense.
• Some of the benefits of moving to the cloud for a contact center are:
• an increase in revenue;
• cost reduction;
• customer satisfaction improvement;
• true business agility.

If you are comfortable when it comes to looking for the opportunity to improve, and know what to look for but don’t know how to start the conversation, here are some conversation starter tips: 

WHY INCONTACT? 

The inContact business model consists of having professional contact center experts in their direct sales and engineering departments who team up with their client partners. 

Q&A 

Q: What is it that the cloud provides to contact center and to SMB that perhaps people don’t know about? 

A: When you move the contact center to the cloud, much like other missing business technology services, you get tremendous efficiency gains. Often times when you look at a premise space contact center, you’ve got a lot of people that are tasked with running it. They are tasked with break fixes, upgrades, and more, in order to keep the contact center running. All of this is very labor- and cost-intensive so that when you need to make upgrades or changes it will take days or even weeks as opposed to the cloud where these can be made instantaneously. In the cloud you can scale your business up and down based on business demand, which means that you are paying for what you are using as instead of overbuying technology. For companies with multiple locations or at-home agents, the cloud is an ecosystem for the contact center and enables greater efficiency. Another great thing about the cloud is that it gives you the capability to right-size your business based on customer demand.

Q: What can inContact bring to the table to help a client determine an ROI story their company leadership? 

A: Part of inContact’s sales model is providing an ROI analysis. This analysis consists of looking at what the client currently has, finding where the gaps in efficiency are, and using that information to put forth inContact’s proposal for service. You can see right away what the you have been paying, what you are using, what you are getting for your investment versus what inContact can do. Some of the cost savings associated with the cloud deployment are so sizable that the ROI is almost immediate.

To have a custom InContact call center solution designed for you...simply ask at the link below.

Custom Contact Center Solution