Would a Contact Center solution work for your business?
First off, CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service. As you may know “_____ as a Service” generally refers to a cloud-based or hosted type of solution. One where the core components and heavy lifting are done by the service provider in their datacenters/cloud. And where you and users get the benefit of easy access and reasonable operational costs, but not the burden of specialized labor, vendor maintenance, and large capital expenditures. "as a Service" can be particularly beneficial in the contact center world. Now, a Contact Center is a business or a business division, within an organization, that manages most or all customer interactions. These business units use various types of highly advanced interacting and integrated technologies to help resolve customer issues quickly, to track customer engagements, and to capture interaction and performance data. For our purposes, we will refer to Contact Center, or CCaaS, as the set or sets of software and systems that are used to run said business or business division. Many CCaaS providers can scale from 3, 4, or 5 agents to thousands all on the same platform. The best CCaaS providers won’t limit the capabilities of the platform for smaller businesses, however, those smaller businesses may not have the expertise to handle all of the platform features. In cases where that may be needed, consider Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Most CCaaS solutions today include their own voice “channel” or telephony and do not require deep integration to an existing phone system or hosted voice solution. They can be a very simple overlay to what is already present.
- Integration with CRM software – Track your successes and failures and analyze the data to improve performance of your agents and experience for your customers. Shave time off each call with simple things like screen-pop customer accounts. Determine the best time to staff more agents. Add new customers to your database and update records with every call.
- More respect for your customers’ time – No one likes waiting on the phone. And having to explain the same problem twice or connecting with an agent who can’t help is even more frustrating. Contact Center Solutions properly direct the call and pass on the information to the next agent.
- Integration with social media – Today’s customers Tweet, Like, and Chat more than making calls. Today’s Contact Center Solutions can monitor and filter social media and detect who needs special attention. You can direct your customers on any social media platform right to your agents.
- It’s all about experience – Contact Center Solutions let a supervisor monitor a call and gives the option of either “whispering” into an agent’s ear without the customer hearing, or “barge” into the call and take over. Either way, the customer will get the benefit of the more experienced agent and have a better call experience.
- Customizable distribution rules – The order that calls are directed can be completely customizable based on tracking and analyzing data on success rate, length of calls, skill sets, and more. You can also make sure customers get the same agent every time.
