Contact centers, their importance and advantages
What are contact centers?
Contact centers are a central hub from which organizations manage all customer interactions across multiple channels. Their primary purpose is to provide customers with efficient and effective technical support, customer service, and sales assistance.
These typically include one or more call centers, but can also include other types of customer contact channels, such as email, web chat, and social media interactions. Furthermore, organizations often integrate contact centers with their customer relationship management (CRM) strategies.
They have grown in importance as customers increasingly expect organizations to be consistently available across multiple channels, not just by phone. Adopting a multichannel approach allows them to improve customer service, increase efficiency, and gain deeper insights into customer behavior and needs to create better customer experiences.
How do contact centers work?
Contact centers typically include agents who handle multichannel customer service, including phone calls, email, chat, and website support. Contact centers are similar to call centers, but they go beyond simply handling calls to reach customers through their preferred channels.
Some of the key characteristics of a contact center are:
- Automatic call or chat distributor (ACD) systems, which allow contact center agents to increase the number of calls or chats received while maintaining a positive customer experience.
- Real-time reports, which allow you to observe and analyze agent performance and customer satisfaction across the various channels used.
- Scripts, which provide agents with a framework to give callers effective support and generate sales or solutions to their needs.
- Automation of processes that allow for faster and more effective service.
Contact center vs. Call Center: What are the differences?
Contact centers and call centers are both customer service centers. Many people use the two terms interchangeably, though they shouldn't. The main difference is that call centers only handle inbound or outbound calls, while a contact center offers omnichannel customer support.
The modular infrastructure of the contact center also allows managers to improve team efficiency and enables teams to benefit from better security measures, more secure data, and greater flexibility.
While contact centers serve a variety of functions, call centers specifically manage telephone interactions, including both inbound and outbound calls. Like contact centers, call centers typically support customer service, technical support, or sales interactions. However, organizations may also use them for telemarketing, information gathering, debt or payment collection, and fraud prevention.
What are the benefits of a contact center?
Save time and money.
Contact centers allow customers to self-service and resolve their issues through keyword-based, two-way instant messaging, text messaging, or chatbot communication. This self-service reduces the amount of time agents spend on the phone, thus reducing customer wait times and lowering overall costs.
Better customer information.
These centers can enhance customer profiling. When customers interact with call centers or contact centers, they share information about their personal preferences and behavior, which agents can collect and use to improve the service experience in future interactions. Organizations can also integrate CRM software with contact centers to gather more customer data and analyze it efficiently.
Improves the service experience.
Call center agents can collect data through their calls, but the digital channels contact centers use make the process easier and more effective. Software collects customer data from every channel used and compiles it into a single customer profile. Because most contact center customers interact through multiple channels, the center collects more data. More data allows the contact center to tailor customer experience (CX) to benefit specific individuals and better route calls and other communications.
Better use of interactive voice response systems.
Call centers use IVR as an automated digital assistant that operates over the phone through voice prompts and keypad input. IVR in call centers often makes it difficult to connect with a live agent and resolve issues efficiently. However, contact centers create IVRs with the service experience in mind. Contact center managers design IVRs to predict caller intent and route callers to the most appropriate agent. Sometimes, IVR can resolve customer inquiries and problems without involving live agents.
Types of contact centers and use cases
The different types of contact centers are hardware, cloud-based, hosted, and virtual.
Hardware contact centers.
Organizations can install and host hardware contact centers on local physical servers. Consequently, hardware contact centers require organizations to have sufficient space and capacity to house and maintain the servers, effective disaster recovery procedures, and competent hardware upgrade processes.
Cloud-based contact centers.
Cloud providers' internet servers host these contact centers, which filter all incoming and outgoing communications. Contact center agents can access the cloud-based contact centers from anywhere on the internet.
Hosted contact centers.
For these contact centers, the organization outsources the infrastructure to another company that manages the systems externally. This approach can minimize upfront costs and maintenance, often leading to a better return on investment.
Virtual contact centers.
These contact centers allow agents to work remotely. Virtual contact centers create flexibility and convenience for contact center agents while simultaneously reducing costs for the organization.
Contact center capabilities and infrastructure
Organizations often build a contact center infrastructure to support communications in the same facilities as the contact center itself, similar to how they do with hardware centers. Alternatively, organizations may outsource the infrastructure for the other three types of contact center services, with external hosting provided by other companies.
In a local setting, the organization also owns and manages its own hardware and software. This approach requires investments in personnel and IT; some organizations outsource to cloud providers or hosting companies.
Operations research and analysis, along with mathematical models such as queuing theory, can support contact center performance. However, contact centers support multiple channels, so they don't have to rely on universal queuing systems. Instead, they can use separate systems with different business processes.
Contact center technologies
The technologies used to maintain and improve contact center performance include the following:
- ACD System: It analyzes incoming calls and distributes them based on various factors.
- Email response management system: It collects and analyzes customer inquiries submitted via email and then directs those inquiries to the appropriate agent.
- IVR System: It allows customers to use a keyboard or voice commands to provide information without human assistance.
- Knowledge management system: a central repository of information that agents can easily search, which can reduce agent training time.
- TTY/TDD Communications: Teletype machines (TTYs) and telecommunications display devices (TDDs) provide assistance to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
- Workforce management system: It helps to schedule and assign staff to agents and manage their performance.
Contact center systems often use call center software. For example, virtual contact centers can use virtual call center software to create a channel for remote agents to manage phone calls as if they were in a centralized call center. However, contact center software often builds upon these basic capabilities to further integrate services across multiple channels and allow agents to route contact information, track contacts, and collect data.
The future of contact centers
As technology evolves and customers rely on new communication channels, contact centers must continue to adapt and grow. Trends impacting contact center communications include the following:
- Social media:
Social media platforms, such as Twitter, have become popular platforms for communicating with customers, so it is important for organizations to support these channels.
- Mobile access:
Customers demand support for mobile-compatible communication services, such as app and text support.
- Videotelephony:
IP/video telephony services, such as FaceTime and Zoom, allow customers to interact with organizations via video chat, enabling more personal face-to-face interactions.
- Advanced analytics:
Analytics are playing an increasingly important role in predicting customer behavior. Organizations can also use voice analytics to monitor, evaluate, and train contact center employees.
A highlight of the future of contact centers, looking towards social media, mobile access and video telephony.
Experts expect AI and augmented reality (AR) technology to assume prominent roles within contact centers. Currently, AI development is focused on agent assistance tools that can listen to calls and follow agent prompts to track customer service records and suggest solutions to customer problems during live conversations. AR introduces a visual element to live agent-customer interactions, allowing agents to suggest and demonstrate solutions to technical issues that verbal descriptions over the phone or chat cannot replicate.
Fountain: Customer service
#We invite you to read our blog post «"What is internet communication and how can we communicate?"»
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