Having a reliable point of contact with your customers is one of the most crucial aspects of running a business. Aside from making sure that orders push through, your contact centre allows your customers to voice out their concerns, ask for assistance, or simply get in touch with you for whatever reason. As such, you need to make sure that your contact centre is well-equipped enough to accommodate the needs and requests of your customers.
But first, what is a contact centre, and why do you need one? For starters, a contact centre is designed to handle customer inquiries and address them in the best way possible. Most of the time, a contact centre allows customers to get instant answers through intuitive self-service tools such as chatbots. However, customers can still get human assistance by having their inquiries routed to live agents.
To deliver this all-encompassing level of service, contact centre solutions must fully maximise automated technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based tools—all while integrating seamlessly into your enterprise’s tech infrastructure to deliver a better customer experience (CX).
That said, what are the telltale signs that your contact centre is the real deal? Here are the green flags you must recognise in your own contact centre. If you don’t see these qualities in your current system, here are the qualities you need to watch out for when shopping around for new solutions:
Offers Good CX Across Multiple Channels
Your customers will be reaching out to you from various devices as well as different channels including email, instant messaging apps, social media, and mobile phone calls. With this, you would need a unified platform to manage interactions through a broad range of digital environments. If your agents and customers are able to communicate effectively anytime, anywhere, and through virtually any channel, then your contact centre solution must be doing a good job.
An efficient contact centre delivers a frictionless, omnichannel experience by facilitating interactions through desktop, mobile or social media apps or any other web-based channel. Your contact centre should ideally be hosted in the cloud, which is the most accessible, collaborative, and suitable environment for handling large volumes of inquiries online as opposed to restrictive, in-house platforms.
Integrates Easily with Your Management System
As previously mentioned, your contact centre must integrate well into your business’s infrastructure in order to effectively address customer queries and concerns. This means being compatible with your customer relationship management (CRM) systems as well as your customer database. If you have an efficient contact centre for your enterprise, your staff can easily check and cross-reference customer data and their pain points, which they can then use to come up with unique solutions to their demands.
Delivers Comprehensive Insights
At its core, handling customer inquiries involves managing large amounts of data: from the specific services that need improvement to your company’s most in-demand goods. To help you in your business intelligence efforts, a good contact centre platform may generate comprehensive insights and use tools like data analytics to identify the root causes of customer concerns. In addition, data gathered through analytics may help you identify top-performing agents and incentivise your team accordingly.
So, if you have a comprehensive view of your customer’s overall demands and have a significantly reduced churn rate on the customer service end, it may be because your contact centre is helping you by generating actionable insights.
Ensures Data Security
Data security and compliance are extremely important in today’s highly connected digital landscape. Ideally, your contact centre would employ the latest data encryption practices to keep customer and business data safe from unauthorised access.
It may also help to have features such as flexible permission-based access, single sign-on (SSO) authentication procedures, and a secure Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service for calling or communicating with your business via the internet. Lastly, it would be a good thing if your contact centre ensures compliance with internationally recognised data security standards such as GDPR, PCI, CPNI, CCPA, and SOX.
Remains Accessible During Emergencies
Customer service may be just a portion of your overall business operations, but it’s an aspect that must be taken seriously when planning your disaster recovery and business continuity strategy. After all, your customers must be able to contact you in times of natural disasters, power outages, and other similar emergencies.
A highly efficient contact centre usually remains operational in times of earthquakes, hurricanes, and similar disruptive scenarios. This need for continuity is also the reason why a lot of businesses want their data and workload hosted in cloud-based platforms. Because cloud-hosted data are stored in disparate data centres, it’s more than likely that your business’s information will remain safe and unaffected, allowing customers to stay in touch with your company, whatever happens.
Promotes Accessibility
One of the toughest challenges in customer service is tailoring responses to different kinds of people. This means considering customers’ specific needs, including their impairments and language difficulties. If you have a good contact centre, customers with impairments would have no difficulty navigating interfaces and voicing their concerns through their preferred methods. Similarly, an efficient customer service platform would allow your agents to understand and accommodate customer concerns with ease.
An efficient contact centre platform fully maximises the use of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) to effectively foster communication between customers and agents. On top of that, your contact centre must have the capacity to recognise a broad range of languages—along with semantics and intent—in order to spot key phrases and topics.
Represents Your Company’s Values
When all is said and done, your contact centre needs to be the perfect fit for your company’s vision and branding. Research suggests that high-quality customer service is a key driver of brand loyalty, and that should be a big reason why you should invest in a contact centre service that ticks all the boxes for solidifying your brand image.
As the main point of interaction with your customers, your contact centre must encapsulate the kind of service and image your company aims to exemplify. By having a contact centre that’s quick and simple yet highly efficient, you are promising reliable service that takes into account the unique needs of different types of customers.