5 Ways to Make Your Contact Center Deliver an Integrated Customer Service Experience


Surveys have shown that narrating the same problem to multiple agents on the same or different channels is the biggest cause of customer frustration. This builds frustration both in the minds of the customer and the customer service representatives. They sometimes find themselves answering repeat calls which eats up a lot of productivity everyday. But is it really their fault, or are they just not equipped with the right contact center software?

Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding with respect to the products and services they consume. Contact Center owners must ask this question to themselves: Is my contact center really just a contact center? Or can it be much more? A revenue generator? The source of better customer service experience?

Following are some ways to ensure an integrated experience:

1. Integrating applications to provide agents a unified view: Agents need to toggle between as many as a dozen applications to build a complete picture of the customer, which is obviously both inefficient and time consuming. This is popularly known as the â€œAlt + Tabâ€ effect, where agents constantly use keys to find the right information, and is one of the major reasons why calls are not resolved in the first instance. History of every interaction on every channel must be captured and offered to the contact center agent in a single view. This will eliminate the need to seek the same information twice from customers.

2. Integrating customer interactions: Speaking to different agents, or going through the same process on IVR System and chat makes customers frustrated. Create an integrated service experience which can enable the customers to return to the same agent on a repeat query. If this can be integrated to an extent with the help of a Contact Center Software, where the calls can be routed according to skill, location, workload, or other business priorities, the entire process moves a step closer to first call resolution.

3. Integrating knowledge repositories to provide self-help options: To improve the service experience for both customers and agents, reducing workload, and faster tracking of complaint resolution by enabling self-service through online channels is very important. The benefits are happier customers and less traffic to your contact center. Self-help can also be extended to create diagnostics system that walks agents through a step-by-step process of issue resolution.

4. Integrating analytics capabilities into performance dashboards: A single view of overall contact center operations can be a very powerful tool. Providing heads of customer service and other senior executives real-time statistics on the total number of calls handled, with customer sentiment analysis, goes a long way in increasing productivity. Powerful analytics application that provides supervisors instant information about various queues, calls handled, agent performance, average call handling time, and average customer wait time can be beneficial as well.

5. Integrating social media into customer experience strategy: Social media is a really cost-effective self-service channel. Companies can facilitate integrated chat service, greater crowdsourcing options, and a peer-to-peer community approach that not only resolves issues, but also deepens customer engagement and improves loyalty.

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