Azentro: 3/42 Cavendish Road, Coorparoo, Brisbane Qld, 4151Ph: 1800 888 555 E: info@azentro.com.au web: azentro.com.au

MULTIMEDIA CONTACT CENTRE

eBook

SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS & ENTERPRISE

www.azentro.com.au

Table of contents 1. A little bit of history on Contact Centres ………………………….. page 3 2. How to choose the right solution for your business ………………page 4 3. The expectations of a Contact Centre ……………………………..page 5 4. The benefits of using Multimedia……………………………………page 7 5. Interactive Voice Response Solution ……………………………….page 8 6. Self-Service Portals ………………………………………………….page 9 7. Cool tools …………………………………………………………….page 10

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The old days – Call Centres When call centres first hit the business world in the 1950’s, some of them were known as phone rooms and they were pretty basic. With staff who answered customers’ calls watching blinking switchboards to see if they had calls waiting. Even though they had limited technology they were a step in the right direction as they offered businesses a sure way of engaging with customers.

The philosophy was UCD – uniform call distribution always sent the next incoming call to extensions in order so the traffic was not evenly distributed over all available extensions. Now days the philosophy is that the longest waiting call is distributed to the operator who has been available for the longest period.

CX Centres today even enable calls to be directed to the operator equipped with the most appropriate skills to handle the caller’s requirement.

The new eraFast forward to 2017 and it’s clear we’ve come a very long way since those formative years. Contact centres are sophisticated and engaging and reflect that we now live in a digital age.

With quick adoption of new Contact Centre strategies your business could create positive disruption in the market. This will enhance your customer relationship and foster more brand loyalty. Knowing which technology to adopt is the key.

A little bit of history on Contact Centres

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How to choose the right solution for your business So what’s around and what does your business need to consider when assessing the right call centre solutions for you?

Starting point

Ask your customers how you can service their needs better? What are their expectations? What is likely to make them a happy customer who will gladly become a repeat customer? Negative feedback Don’t just ask for the positive stuff, ask your customers for the things they don’t like about your business, feedback on negative sentiment can be just as useful to your business growth. Do you know what is likely to incur negative feedback about your current call centre?

Ask Your Staff Your staff have more interaction with your clients on a daily basis than anyone, what is holding them back from delivering a better, more comprehensive service? Are you ready to implement integrated contact centre solutions for business and enterprise to make this year your best yet?

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Changing needs

For over 40 years contact centres provided one option…voice. Now up to 40% of all contact centre traffic is via other media types like Email, SMS, Web Chat, Social Media, Interactive Voice Response and self-service portals. Rapidly evolving technology has led to dramatic changes in what customers expect from your service. New expectations

Businesses are challenged to provide the same prompt, informed customer experience they deliver on the phone, no matter what method of contact a customer chooses. It’s become commonplace for any business to engage with their client base via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Is your contact centre doing that, and if not, why?

Boosting productivity

Our partner Mitel, who provide one of the best integrated contact centre solutions, suggests various ways you can improve your call centre productivity. Mitel says, “whether it’s a small, internal help desk focused on supporting staff or a large, geographically dispersed group of agents helping drive sales and customer support, serving your customer base efficiently and effectively, while creating quality customer experiences, is crucial”.

How can you ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction while controlling resourcing costs? The next page outlines some of their contact centre solutions.

The expectations of a Contact Centre

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How can you ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction while controlling resourcing costs?

Let your agents know who the next customer is Integrating your contact centre with your customer database saves the agent an average of 15 seconds per interaction. Screen popping client information (name, number, purchase history) to the agents desktop not only guarantees huge productivity gains but it can also improve the time required to service the clients’ needs, which is another key metric for happy customers.

Provide a contact history

Who hasn’t experienced this at some point? You contact a business to follow-up on an earlier inquiry and the agent you’re speaking to has no knowledge of your previous interactions with one of their co-workers. There is an easy solution to this: give your agents access to detailed contact history. This can be provided through desktop screen pops, reports and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integrations.

With access to contact history, agents know how often a customer contacted the company the previous week, with whom the customer interacted with, the duration of the interaction and what happened as documented in the notes provided. Agents can tap into the knowledge gained by agents who previously assisted that customer’s needs and provided premium customer service.

Allow data entry to be automatic

Do your agents have to enter customer information into different systems? For instance, do they record call information in your contact centre software and then have to re-enter it into your CRM database? If so, they’re wasting valuable time that they could otherwise be using to help customers. Furthermore, with feature rich add-ons, customers can confirm their details are correct while they wait on hold, keeping the database up to date and the client occupied while they wait.

Improving the Customer Experience

Those who’ve worked in contact centres know that old adage “if you can’t measure it, you can’t make it better”. Good software ought to have a valuable reporting component so look for one that provides comprehensive historical reporting, real-time monitoring, lifecycle reports, and advanced data filtering and search capabilities. These tools enable supervisors to see the big picture while readily pinpointing problem areas to effectively measure and manage performance. Posting live information to wallboards to enable agents to have more visibility of their active KPI’s can also enhance customer service.

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The benefits of using multimedia

As we’ve briefly mentioned already, customers, as opposed to simply phoning your business, may send you an email, a text message, a chat over the Internet or even reach out to you through Twitter or Facebook. Regardless of the way clients contact your business, you need your agents to be just as responsive as they would be on the phone.

With a multimedia contact centre solution, you allow your customers to get in touch with you in the channel of their choice, which is a key step in creating and maintaining happy customers.

Equally as important, you can enable your agents to handle multiple contacts simultaneously. For example, agents could handle a voice call, two emails and a couple of Web chats at once, which boosts agent productivity and lowers customer wait times.

While many organisations are already handling enquiries with multimedia options, at best you would be using different reporting mechanisms for each media type. This makes it almost impossible to see media migration trends, like the one we are experiencing in the market now from voice to email and web chat. Having a single reporting engine that can blend reports across media types empowers your business or enterprise to increase service to new heights.

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Integrated Voice Response (IVR) technology can be used to take the customer’s information, help navigate to the proper department and provide self-service for clients not looking to speak with an agent.

Doing so can produce higher customer satisfaction by eliminating wait times, curtailing operational costs and freeing up customer service representatives for more critical customer engagements.

The benefits delivered by an IVR solution are evident for both customers and organisations. Our partner Mitel collected these recent stats about contact centre customers and their experiences:

• Among companies who measure support centre success across email, chat, web and voice, 62 per cent use IVR.

• 79 per cent of customers who had a negative experience with a company told others about it

• 86 per cent of customers stopped doing business with a company because of a bad customer service experience

• Nearly 90 per cent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience

• By 2020, it’s expected a customer will manage 85 per cent of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human.

Interactive Voice Response Solution

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Self-service portalsHow to engage your customers Imagine a scenario where the customer essentially does all the work while boosting your productivity and profits. This is at the heart of self-service portals in your digital contact centre and naturally you will want your digital contact centre to incorporate various features. They are:

• Provide an auto-attendant so callers can easily decide who is best suited to respond to their needs

• Offer a more complex self-portal that gives them the choice of interacting with your business without the help of an agent

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These software features which help both the customer and the agent ought to be in your contact centre. Here’s the pick of the crop:

• Cradle to grave lifecycle reports – your supervisors can trace activities related to specific calls, identify performance issues and boost call flow designs

• Customisable reporting – you put the right data (like statistics from various reports and custom calculations) in the hands of managers and supervisors, making it easier to compare key information from various systems across your business

• Agent forecasting – this software feature allows supervisors to more efficiently create schedules, communicate staffing and resourcing challenges and spend more time performing mission-critical functions such as coaching and mentoring agents

• Schedule adherence monitoring – this tool allows supervisors to verify that employees are performing their on- and off-phone duties as scheduled

• Queue control – supervisors can save time with queue control and can improve customer service by managing queues efficiently. They can instantly change agent and queue availability to adjust to unplanned call volumes

• Outbound dialling – this helps businesses to efficiently conduct outbound contact centre tasks, such as marketing campaigns or sales follow-ups

• Disaster recovery – your contact centre can ensure that it is prepared for unplanned network, data and power outages thereby protecting revenues and customer satisfaction

• A cloud-based contact centre often has all of the features and benefits of an on-premises solution with the added advantages of lower hardware and IT staffing costs; data protection and security; increased scalability and flexibility by allowing you to add hardware, software and devices easily with little to no downtime.

• Agents anywhere on almost any device – Become an employer of choice by allowing staff to work remotely. Employ the work at home mother that only wants to work between 9am and 3pm (also conveniently, your busiest period).

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Cool Tools

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About Azentro

Azentro is a market leading integrator of telephony, unified communications, mobility and data technology solutions. One of Brisbane’s largest business telephone system providers for more than 20 years we are strategically optimised to help improve businesses performance, empower people to connect and support business growth and change as technology evolves.

Phone: 1800 888 555 Address: 3/42 Cavendish Road, Coorparoo QLD 4151 www.azentro.com.au

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Azentro: 3/42 Cavendish Road, Coorparoo, Brisbane Qld 4151 Ph: 1800 888 555 E: info@azentro.com.au web: azentro.com.au