For the traditional call centre operator, the emergence of multi-channel communications into the customer service space has represented a major disruption.
It hasn’t yet, of course, affected everyone. The telephone is still by far and away the dominant medium for communication between businesses and customers, and depending on the nature of your business and your customer demographics, there may well be some time to go before that changes.
Nonetheless, change is in the air. Research suggests that as many as one in five consumers prefer to use email to the telephone if they require service from a company, while one in eight would opt for web chat.
The point is, choice is viewed as one of the great bastions of customer service. If you subscribe to that view, you should really be putting your money where your mouth is and allowing customers the choice of their preferred communication method when it comes to interacting with you.
Turning your call centre into an omni-channel contact centre which caters for email, web chat, chatbot, contact form, SMS and social media may represent some pain for a business. But it hands the freedom of choice to customers, and is widely viewed as the future of customer contact.
For those concerned about stepping into such a strange new world, there is help at hand. Contact centre solutions developers such as Enghouse Interactive have applied themselves to the task of making the switch to omni-channel as painless and as beneficial as possible.
With its Communications Center platform, Enghouse offers clients a simple proposition. Not only, the company claims, will its solution hand a complete choice of contact channels to customers, and ensure consistency of service across all, it will actually help to boost overall satisfaction rates by making first time resolution easier, cutting wait times and abandonment rates and utilising staffing resources more efficiently.
How do they do that, you ask? Read on and all will be revealed. But first, please remember that UC Today is a completely independent news and insight service for the UC industry, and does not promote or endorse any particular brands or products.
What can it do?
Enghouse Interactive’s Communications Center is a modular contact centre platform available as an on-premises deployment. It combines phone, email, web chat, SMS, social media and video contact channels into a single integrated system, with a simple user-friendly interface for agents and combined reporting and recording.
Communications Center uses a single omni-channel queuing system to ensure consistency of service no matter how a customer chooses to contact a business. Not only that, but this centralised workflow also enables more effective and efficient routing to ensure that the right queries get to the right people.
Skills-based intelligent routing across all channels greatly speeds up the journey from first contact to resolution, by cutting out the need for an agent to act as middleman in finding the right place to refer a customer to. On the other hand, should an agent need assistance and need to escalate or refer a call, they can do so with a single click from within their UX, with availability and presence information displayed as part of the internal directory.
Communications Center makes available a range of analytics and monitoring tools, allowing clients to do everything from pull out agent performance reports to track customer interaction histories, as well as display live stats and allow supervisors to manage agent availability and allocation in real time.