What You Should Know When Choosing A Contact Centre Solution

As any business owner can tell you, the quality of your customer service can either help your company succeed or set it up to fail. With today’s ever-evolving technologies and consumer demands, you need to make sure that everything is up to par in terms of customer experience (CX).

Given this, one of the biggest ways to ensure good CX is by boosting your contact centre capabilities, which essentially involve every direct interaction with your customers. These interactions encompass everything from emails to social media inquiries to phone calls. As such, your contact centre must be equipped with the latest technologies to ensure a frictionless experience for your customers regardless of their preferred method of reaching out to your company.

To do all of these things, it’s important to pick contact centre solutions that meet your standards for tech compatibility, data security, ease of rollout, and other aspects relevant to customer assistance. With this, here’s all that you need to know when selecting the right contact centre solution for your company’s needs:

Cloud-Based Solutions are Ideal

Cloud migration is one of the biggest trends in tech today, and for a good reason. Web-based cloud environments allow teams to collaborate across various locations and devices, providing a higher level of flexibility compared to in-house systems. On top of that, cloud environments are known for providing a high level of scalability. This means that you can scale up or dial down your storage and hosting needs depending on your company’s operational demands.

In a nutshell, hosting your contact centre operations in the cloud allows agents to connect with customers and your team through almost any internet-connected device. With a consolidated and accessible platform, you no longer need to rely on costly and outdated communications hardware.

You’ll Need a Solution That Allows for Multichannel Strategies

Nowadays, it’s important to have an inclusive customer service system that takes into account the variety of channels from which customers will reach out. With mobile business messaging traffic reaching trillions in recent years, it’s no surprise that most companies would want to ramp up CX capabilities involving text-based channels such as SMS, web chats, and email. However, it’s also important to retain focus on the old-school way of receiving and answering calls.

So, even though text-based communications are becoming the norm, customers still prefer having a variety of options for feedback and assistance. Your contact centre must be well-equipped to accommodate chats and emails, but your customers must also have the option to call a human agent when they seek more personalised support. When choosing a contact centre solution, you have to watch out for omnichannel strategies that support seamless customer interactions regardless of channel and device.

You’ll Want to Avoid Solutions with Slow Integration and Deployment

As a general rule, your contact centre solution must integrate smoothly with your existing infrastructure—be it your customer relationship management (CRM) system, IT help desk, e-commerce-platform, website, or social media platforms. Your contact centre must be flexible and configurable enough to suit a wide range of mission-critical systems, which ultimately leads to high-quality customer service across all endpoints. A contact centre solution that can be easily integrated into your tech stack will undoubtedly be rolled out quickly, enabling your company to address customer concerns as quickly as possible.

Automated Functionalities Can Greatly Improve Efficiency and Productivity

Aside from reducing the burden of repetitive tasks for your agents, automated solutions allow customers to swiftly get the answers and assistance they need. For example, you can optimise customer assistance by opting for a game-changing contact centre solution that incorporates self-service options and intuitive inquiry routing capabilities. It may also help to have queue management systems enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), along with AI-driven virtual agents and chatbots, to handle a wide range of queries in different languages.

Your Chosen Solution Should Feature Comprehensive Reporting Capabilities

On the subject of automation, it may be advantageous for your business to choose a contact centre that can automatically generate reports. Having analytics-driven tools that translate large volumes of data into actionable insights may be useful for various purposes, from business intelligence to the measurement of your agents’ key performance indicators (KPIs). Such reports give you an overview of matters such as average response time, resolution rate, and customer retention rate, all of which are vital in determining how well your business is doing in delivering good CX.

Adequate Training Support is a Must

Another quality of a good contact centre is its capacity to support staff training. With this, it’s important to ensure that your contact centre’s interface is easy to use and understand. Platforms that are too complicated for your staff to navigate are simply not going to be worth the time and effort. With that in mind, it’s best to choose a contact centre that’s efficient yet simple enough for staff to learn during a quick training session.

On a related note, it might benefit your company to have a contact centre with features that can help train agents and improve their performance. For instance, you can choose a contact centre solution that has call and screen recording features to provide learning aids for agents. Other valuable features include “dynamic reply” templates, speech and text analysis, scripting tools, and dual listening capabilities for both agents and supervisors.

You Shouldn’t Compromise on Security and Reliability

Customer service operations are largely driven by data that are primarily comprised of customers’ personal information: account numbers, addresses, and the like. That being said, you need to make sure that your contact centre is compliant with security standards that are recognised around the world. It may help to pick solutions that are compliant with GDPR data security requirements and hold ISO certifications in similarly relevant areas.

In addition to data and cybersecurity, it would help to have a contact centre solution that can be relied upon to ensure business continuity. When shopping around for your next contact centre, be sure to inquire about matters such as uptime guarantee and disaster recovery to ensure continuity during emergency scenarios.

An Efficient Contact Centre Solution is an Investment

When planning a modernisation strategy, it’s important to not overlook the value of a reliable contact centre solution. CX plays a big role in the survivability of your business, and bad customer service can easily affect brand loyalty, industry reputation, and company longevity. Whether you’re expanding your customer service capabilities or planning to change your existing system, be sure to remember the above in order to determine the solutions that best fit your company’s goals and ethos.