Contact centers (CCs) serve as a dynamic bridge between businesses and their customers. First impressions, often shaped by using vendors’ technologies, are critical and can lead to loyalty or push customers away.
Providing consistently good service is imperative. However, modern CCs and their users, like many businesses, still encounter obstacles that can significantly affect their performance.
One key development reshaping the CC landscape is Contact Centers as a Service (CCaaS). This model, offered by vendors, brings new possibilities, but also presents fresh challenges.
CCaaS — Nucleus of Modern Communications
The rise of CCaaS affected companies to now manage more and more people. This cloud-based service allows companies to communicate directly with their customers via chat, email, social media, and phone. However, that means more queries, as well as additional attention and maintenance.
To address these new challenges, vendors need to understand the key pain points experienced by CC users. You, as a CC provider, should offer solutions that not only solve these problems but also provide growth and continuous improvement.
And that’s where the Bicom platform comes in—a truly unified and well-organized solution, adapted to meet the evolving needs of today’s CCs and its users. With this in place, you are able to address major pain points and improve overall performance.
Common Pain Points Faced by CC Users
Long Wait Times
Customers always expect quick responses, and long wait times, as well as redirections, usually cause frustration.
A dissatisfied customer may immediately seek out another service or leave negative reviews about your client’s business—all of which can cost money and reputation.
Limited Channel Options
Enhancing the customer experience (CX) in modern CCs involves personalizing their journey. When CCs offer more choices for customers to interact with the business, it creates a more comfortable experience and builds trust.
Sticking to only one communication channel needlessly hinders accessibility and flexibility. If customers prefer email, chat, or social media over phone calls, they might become unhappy.
Repetitive Information Gathering
Good employee experience is essential for good CX. However, when agents have to ask customers the same questions all over again, both parties are frustrated. This leads to decreased employee morale and lower customer satisfaction.
Modern CCs seek to minimize the impact of these issues. Here are some of the key tactics that they employ to achieve that.
Eliminating the Issues with Specialized Tools
A Smarter CC Utilizing Chatbots and IVR
Without automation, agents have to answer frequently asked questions, which causes significant bottlenecks and long wait times. This is why smart technologies like chatbots and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) should be at the top of your list when improving CCs and the overall experience.
With chatbots and IVR, requests are efficiently directed to the right queues, ensuring agents handle inquiries within their expertise. Customers can select an option and be routed to the appropriate queue. This prevents wasted time on misrouted requests and ensures customers get the right help.
This is also useful when CCs offer 24/7 support, which means your client doesn’t have to worry about improving the infrastructure. Chatbots and IVR solutions make support faster and easier, both for the representatives and customers.
Bicom Systems’ product is designed for CCs and addresses exactly long wait times as a pain point. We have implemented chatbots and IVR, knowing they optimize resource utilization and reduce idle time, which in turn increases your business efficiency and customer satisfaction.
We also introduced canned responses which can save agent’s time. If unsure how to respond to a customer, they can enable private message mode to easily seek assistance from their supervisor.
Skill-Based Agent Assignments and Interaction Distribution
In CCs, it’s typical to find some agents excel at de-escalation but may struggle to empathize with customers, while others, for example, are particularly good at retention.
That’s why you should consider Automatic Call Distribution (ACD). It forwards the incoming interactions to the most appropriate agent or department, without creating disorganized queues.
With the right agent handling the right queries, both the speed and quality of the service provided contribute to a better CX and higher retention rates.
And that’s what experts here at Bicom Systems had in mind. To help minimize the cognitive load of dealing with unrelated or complex issues in your client’s business, we created a solution with sophisticated voice query routing strategies that eliminates the long wait times and repetitive information gathering.
For messaging channels, our team has developed a more comprehensive strategy based on agent capacity, agent availability, agent workload and agent unserved time. This strategy also incorporates chat history and the previous agent who interacted with the customer.
Boosting Productivity with Automatic Dialer Features
In addition to skill-based assignments, productivity can also be boosted with automatic dialing features. Nobody likes tedious copy-paste processes or manually entering contacts. These may take up a significant amount of agent time and prolong customer wait times.
Our PBXware Contact Center edition includes an Automatic Dialer, a true gem for saving your client’s staff time. Instead of manually dialing each contact, Automatic Dialer lets agents upload a contact list and automate the dialing process, allowing them to focus on meaningful customer interactions.
With these smart options on the table, you, as a communications services provider, can demonstrate a commitment to customer-centric solutions, which in turn helps build a strong reputation and contribute to greater success in the market.
Comprehensive and Customer-Centric Omnichannel Feature
Limited channel options are one of the main obstacles that modern CCs face. If customers can’t choose their preferred communication channel, the overall customer experience suffers.
According to Forbes, 81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience; 70% value when the CC representative knows their previous interactions with the company.
And that’s where the omnichannel option comes into play. Customers can choose the communication channel that suits them best! This flexibility drives three significant business outcomes: improved customer satisfaction, higher retention, and stronger brand loyalty.
Bicom Systems’ CC solution addresses limited channels with its own omnichannel integration. We have enabled 6 key channels: voice, SMS, LiveChat, email, Facebook messenger and Whatsapp.
An approach like this empowers CCs to offer a more personalized CX,, thereby leading to stronger relationships and contributing to business growth.
Better Performance and Deeper Insight Into Previous Interactions
Given how tedious repeating information to each agent tends to be for the customer, modern CCs have resolved to consolidate the customer journey across all communication channels.
This allows team members to deliver a seamless experience and increase customer trust in your client’s service.
On top of that, an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or internally developed contacts module ensures that all customer data is in one place.
Our CC solution offers CRM integration for the voice channel, while other channels utilize the contacts module, which is internally developed in the CC edition and offers the possibility of adding customers or leads into the internal contacts base.
In addition to addressing the pain point of repetitive information gathering, these changes enhance the productivity of your client’s employees, as well as operational efficiency.
Extensive Training and Support for New Systems
While the introduction of omnichannel has revolutionized the way CCs operate, its benefit is greatly diminished if it’s not managed properly.
For systems to run smoothly, agents and their supervisors need to know how the omnichannel panel works best, as well as how to leverage all its benefits for optimal service.
At Bicom Systems, we place special emphasis on this, by offering comprehensive training sessions to ensure that your client’s team can use the system efficiently. Our experts will provide continuous support to straighten out any questions or issues.
Resolve Your Challenges with Us
It’s worth noting that these major pains are related, with one problem leading to another. By solving one issue, you tend to resolve other associated problems as well.
In this blog post, we covered key pain points that CCs and their users face, and how omnichannel solutions and smart tools can effectively address them. Vendors offering such solutions are way more adaptable to ever-changing customer needs.
That’s why Bicom Systems’ solutions are designed to help you address all these common pain points. With our solution, provide flexible and comprehensive solutions to your clients, maintain relevance, and attract more customers over time.
We strive not only to improve customer performance and CX but also to build long-term partnerships. Contact us today to learn how Bicom Systems can help you optimize your client’s operations and achieve better results.