What’s the worst that can happen in a contact centre? Poor service causing customers to look elsewhere? Spending so much time managing and maintaining your system that you miss opportunities to build longer, stronger relationships with your customers?
How about a lack of continuity between different communications channels, and between different customer service teams, leading to a confusing and disjointed customer experience?
Perhaps more important than any of these questions - would you know if any of the above applied your contact centre?
According to a white paper from 8x8, possibly not. The cloud communications pioneer claims that most businesses find it very difficult to keep track of what happens in the contact centre, for a variety of reasons.
High amongst these reasons is sheer complexity. Quoting from a CCNG Survey, 8x8 points out on its website that the average contact centre has to deal with around 18 different equipment, services and software vendors.
This is an astonishing statistic. Can any business expect to build and maintain a truly efficient and responsive IT network made up of 18 or more component parts? How do you track performance and impact across so many? How do you ensure they all integrate and work with one another, so you are not having to continuously firefight glitches and bottlenecks in the network?
Put simply, 8x8 believes you don’t. They claim that many operational challenges experienced in the contact centre stem from having cumbersome, unwieldy system architectures which themselves get in the way of smooth, efficient performance.
8x8’s answer is Virtual Contact Centre, a cloud contact centre solution which promises everything a contact centre operation requires, all in a single integrated platform.
8x8’s claim is that a truly end-to-end contact centre solution like this improves the overall customer experience while driving down costs. We will attempt to unpick whether that is feasible in this review. But before we do, please remember that UC Today is an independent news and insight service and that we do not endorse or promote any particular brands or products.
What can it do?
8x8 Virtual Contact Centre is a cloud-based omni-channel platform which combines communications, customer service tools and performance analytics. It is available in four editions:
- Digital: Stripped down email and chat channels with pre-built CRM integration, plus dashboards and analytics.
- Standard: Includes a voice channel with IVR, queued call back, dashboards and analytics.
- Pro: Full multi-channel capabilities with enhanced IVR.
- Ultimate: Adds quality management and a preview dialer to the Pro suite.
In terms of available tools, Virtual Contact Centre is as comprehensive a solution as there is available, combining typical contact centre resources with a number of innovative and sophisticated additions. Alongside CTI, CRM integration means agents get automatic access to in-depth customer information with every call, helping them to personalise and tailor the service they provide. As an extension to this, Personal Agent Connect allows businesses to refer high value customers to specific agents, helping to nurture stronger, more personal relationships.
