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Improving Contact Center Performance with Real-Time Intelligence

August 12, 2015 by

In the realm of customer support, information is invaluable. The more data available to a customer service representative, the better he or she will be able to resolve the client's problem. Conversely, a lack of information will lead to complications and frustration on both ends.

That's why real-time intelligence is such an important resource for optimized contact center performance. With a unified communications solution that incorporates real-time intelligence, contact center personnel can provide a huge boost to service quality, leading to more satisfied customers and agents alike.

Service Blunders

Today's customers are, as a general rule, far less patient and forgiving than they were in the past. People have become accustomed to receiving top-notch service quickly, and anything less is seen as a disappointment.

Yet such an outcome is often inevitable when contact center agents lack sufficient insight on their clients. When this is the case, a customer is far more likely to wait for long stretches before finally speaking to the agent best suited to resolving his or her specific issue. There is also a high risk that the customer will need to repeat information multiple times, which will obviously result in a less satisfying experience.

Being switched from agent to agent and reiterating basic information over and over is particularly frustrating if this is not the client's first call. It is already irritating for a consumer to be forced to reach out to a company for a second or even third time in order to resolve a single problem. That frustration becomes much greater if the subsequent calls are seen as unnecessarily inefficient and redundant. Such disappointing incidents can easily sour consumers on a given company and convince them to look elsewhere in the future.

Course Correction

Real-time communications analytics and business intelligence can enable contact center personnel to avoid these outcomes. This is thanks to the technology's ability to pore through available databases and present relevant information to the customer support agent instantly.

With these technologies, a contact center agent who receives a call from a client can immediately access the company's data on that individual, culled from internal sources such as Salesforce and other CRM solutions. Before the conversation is underway, the agent can see who the caller is, what purchases he or she has made, and, critically, what previous interactions he or she has had with the company.

With this insight at hand, the agent can easily avoid asking questions that the client has already answered. Instead, the customer support representative can dive right into the current issue, reducing average call times and improving satisfaction rates.

Just as importantly, the customer's history with the company and contact center will help the agent determine how best to tackle the current issue. It may become clear immediately that the client needs to speak with a technical expert - a fact that would otherwise only emerge after prolonged, previously-attempted efforts to resolve the problem by the agent.

New Opportunities

Significantly, having access to contextual intelligence allows customer support agents to play a much larger role in terms of upsells. After all, this technology ensures that the customer service representative can quickly and easily see exactly what products or services the client has previously purchased from the company, as well as all other interactions. Given this information, it's much easier for the agent to determine which of the business's other offerings would make a good match, and then naturally pitch these products or services in the course of the service call. This has a much higher success rate than blind sales efforts, helping to improve the company's bottom line while also delivering better customer support.

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