Last month we shared a brand new part of Kakapo Systems' Unity Contact Center Management Portal: the Contact Center Dashboard. We briefly referred to the different queues and media streams that BroadSoft providers can set up through the Dashboard; and now it's time to dive into the most recently-added one: SMS.
Another Communications Channel
What does the addition of SMS queues mean for the contact centre?
[caption id="attachment_25653" align="alignright" width="189"]
Steve Tutt[/caption]
"It's a way of letting a company use SMS as a customer service channel or a sales channel," explains Steve Tutt, Marketing Director at Kakapo Systems. "This means that a company gets a mobile number for their contact centre. They can put it on their website and a customer can text it. The customer's SMS then gets routed around to the contact centre agents the same way that all the other media streams (webchat, email, callback, twitter) do, and they can answer it from within the Unity platform."
Simply put, this means that BroadSoft providers using Kakapo's Unity Contact Center solution can now not only communicate with customers via SMS, but they can actually do it from within the Unity platform.
"Our system simply queues up the SMS and drops into the next available agent," says Tutt. "The agent uses the same Unity interface to answer it as they would do with all other types of conversations coming in."
One of the huge advantages of having SMS built into the contact centre solution, rather than as a separate product, is that the agent can actually see the customer's history.
"This means that even if the customer replies back a couple of days later when the agent gets the SMS, it's not completely random, because they can see all the previous messages, emails or web chats that might have come in, etc. The key thing here is that you're not having separate processes – it's all integrated into the same platform. It makes things easier for the agent and provides the customer with a better experience."
Another key feature that Kakapo offers in this context is a simple, seamless experience of sending and accessing PDFs and images via SMS.
