Top 6 Characteristics of the Modern Contact Center

A modern contact center is a key place that shapes inbound and outbound communications with clients using various customer engagement channels. Its success relies entirely on meeting and even exceeding customer expectations.

So what ensures exceptional service and customer experience? Firstly, you need a team of skilled agents. Secondly, your contact center should take advantage of the latest technologies supporting systems integration and operating as a single unified solution.

We’ve picked up six characteristics of modern contact centers that you can consider to build your own effective operations. They all aim to elevate customer experience and enhance agent performance.

1. Focused on Customer Experience

Customer experience is like an axis around which contact centers set goals and measure performance. In today’s competitive business climate, it is critical to deliver exceptional service. Thus, a focus on creating unique experiences for customers should be an important investment for your company.

Living in a digital world, customers become more demanding than ever. They ask for personalized service, switch brands easily after just one bad experience, and don’t want to wait on hold. For contact centers, it all means that they have to come up with new technological advancements to win and keep customer’s loyalty.

One of the ways to address your customer needs is to accommodate their growing love for self-service and voice-to-search tools. This could be achieved by the implementation of intelligent software solutions to help automate and route calls and requests.

Learn more What Tools Help Improve Customer Experience

For example, such solutions as IVR and Skills-Based Routing can help reduce the number of contact center agents and guide the customer to reach the right specialist much faster. Sometimes, there’s even no need to interact with your company representatives. A chatbot can handle the request without human intervention.

Additionally, customer experience can be elevated with the use of such tools as screen sharing and co-browsing. They allow for decreasing the number of touchpoints a client should have to receive assistance with what she or he is looking for. Eventually, it enhances engagement and optimizes support speed.

2. Designed for Omnichannel Communications

Omnichannel support is a must-have for contact centers nowadays. Providing customers with service that relies only on calls and emails is obviously not enough to create a seamless experience. At the same time, an omnichannel strategy is far more than just adding chats, social media, or instant messengers to the communication options.

It is essential to transfer the clients’ conversations to where they feel the most convenient and engage with them there. Keeping a single communications history across all channels will allow you to go from one channel to another flawlessly and effortlessly. On top of that, you will be able to provide a consistent and personalized experience.

When adopted successfully, omnichannel customer service elevates contact center operations in many ways. In particular, it leads to:

• Better customer insights
• Improved agent productivity
• Reduced costs
• Real-time engagement
• Personalized communications

To achieve maximum value across all touchpoints with customers, many companies turn to a single platform for all communications. Unified contact center solutions empowered with AI technologies enable businesses to provide a seamless experience for their clients with an end-to-end view of the entire customer journey.

3. Centered around Staff Productivity and Collaboration

The success of contact centers greatly depends on staff performance. One way to encourage your agents and reps is to create a positive working environment, optimize the schedule, and diversify tasks. If your employees are working remotely, make sure they have everything for seamless collaboration, including mobile access to the main business applications.

Read more about the Tips for Effective Remote Working

Another way to boost productivity among the staff is to provide them with robust tools to facilitate their daily operations.

You know, of course, that CRM is one of the core solutions to manage effective communications with clients. There are many options on the market, but only with the right process-driven CRM at hand can your team achieve maximum efficiency. A CRM seamlessly integrated with your phone system, power dialer, or help desk software will be an all-in-one tool for your sales, marketing, and service operations.

Learn how CRM Implementation Helped a Fintech Company Improve Customer Service and Increase ROI

Additionally, there are many useful tools that help companies take the performance of the agents to the next level. Task management, power dialer, automated follow-ups, access to the knowledge base, prompts on the call, or script adherence can easily streamline contact center processes and accelerate service delivery.

4. Refined by Smooth Systems Integration

One more trait of a successful contact center is fluid and flexible operations. In accordance with this, applications and systems integration is incredibly important. It offers ample opportunities to improve responsiveness, increase data accuracy, and fuel efficiency.

We’ve considered the most significant integrations for your CRM and shortlisted the tools and solutions you should focus on first:

• Mailing server
• Telephony
• Live Chat
• Social Media
• Document Management System
• Ecommerce platform
• Accounting software
• Help desk
• Collaboration tools
• Meeting calendar

Eventually, systems integration provides you with powerful resources to automate contact center processes, reduce manual activities, and eliminate possible errors. It all leaves you with more time to concentrate your efforts on what’s most important — communications with customers.

5. Promote High Accessibility and Scalability

In order to address business challenges and innovate to meet the company’s needs, a modern contact center should be agile and responsive. To achieve this, you can adopt a contact center platform with a cloud-native technology stack: architecture, microservices, agile DevOps processes, and continuous delivery workflows.

Putting all customer service apps and functions into a unified cloud environment allows companies to gain high accessibility and scalability. Unlike disruptive legacy software, cloud-based contact center solutions provide greater security and stability, enable integration with other services, and enhance effective communication. As a result, you can expect better team productivity and customer experience.

Read more about The Best Practices to Update Legacy Software

6. Driven by Intelligent Performance Data

The last but definitely not the least important aspect to pay attention to is contact center analytics. All the characteristics mentioned above become useless if you don’t know how to monitor and measure the productivity of your team.

Data analytics helps determine which communications convert to sales, why certain agents are more effective than others, and what boosts customer engagement.

For example, AI-powered Call Analytics provides you with real-time or on-demand call transcripts, timing details, and agent auto-scoring based on preset criteria.

Case Study: How AI-Call Analytics Increased the Performance of an Inbound Call Center

Additional help comes from customized dashboards and reports that allow companies to see the actual picture of contact center performance and find out what drives more deals. As a consequence, companies can get meaningful insights, turn them into actions, and implement best practices.

What Characteristics Is Your Contact Center Missing?

Keeping up with customer expectations may be challenging but, with the right tools at hand, your contact center can easily achieve two main goals — streamline customer experience and improve agent performance.

All modern contact centers have a common ground: they ensure omnichannel communications with the use of a single cloud-based platform that consolidates all tools and data.

Velvetech’s expertise in contact center solutions empowers companies to address their business challenges, achieve goals, and keep ahead of their competitors. Our team is experienced in CRM implementation and Contact Center Automation empowered with AI and machine learning technologies. Explore the potential of a modern contact center; reach out to us today!