Increasing Contact Center Efficiency While Reducing Costs

By
IntelligentHQ
Increasing Contact Centre Efficiency While Reducing Costs
Increasing Contact Centre Efficiency While Reducing Costs

Businesses are constantly looking to do more with less. That means increasing operational efficiency and revenue generating opportunities. The contact center has traditionally been a cost center, showing up as a red mark on corporate budgets. Still, they are a necessary cost of doing business.

Modern contact center technologies allow customer service teams to operate much more efficiently to reduce the cost per interaction, increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty and, ultimately, generate revenue opportunities. Many companies have found ways of turning these traditional cost centers into profit centers by deploying the latest technologies and strategies.

Webtecs explains that a cloud based contact center can increase your company’s productivity.

Here’s a look at a few successful strategies.

Self Service

IVRs are ideal for promoting self-service options through either traditional IVRs or modern visual systems that offers a screen-based navigable representation of the IVR system. They allow customers to solve their own problems without ever having to involve a live agent. By encouraging customers to find their own answers, businesses decrease the number of human interactions and reduce costs, but also ensure prioritized callers receive immediate assistance, thereby increasing satisfaction thanks to faster resolution.

Messaging – More than 8 trillion text messages are sent every year; Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp account for about 22 trillion more. It’s a dominant channel and one that customers prefer, so it makes sense consumers would react positively to being able to receive customer support across these channels as well.

From text messaging to in-app messaging and chat, messaging can be a non-disruptive tool for customer support that reduces costs and increases agent efficiency. Live chat and messaging apps allow agents to manage multiple customers simultaneously, and automated chat takes agents out of the interaction entirely.

Proactive Engagement

Based on customer histories and other product or service information, businesses can easily use IVR, messaging or other channels to deliver important information to customers. These may include subscription renewal offers, appointment reminders, upgrade opportunities or information on purchased products or other related products that might be of interest. Proactive campaigns not only reduce calls to contact centers but can also increase revenue in the process.

Chatbots

Consumers want and expect to use automated self-service options. In fact, a majority report trying self-service as the first customer service option. Resolving issues on their own gives them a feeling of control and empowerment and allows them to do it on their own terms, without having to wait for live agents. Many self-service options, from knowledge bases to interactive chat, can be automated, thereby reducing the burden on live agents and allowing them to focus their efforts on more pressing needs.

Interactive Voice Response – Despite the emergence of other digital channels, IVR remains a key customer service tool. Customers prefer using channels that are convenient, which often includes voice. In fact, voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana are teaching customers to leverage automated speech recognition, which allows IVR to behave almost like live agents, delivering accurate, contextual information and answers quickly. Then there are advanced IVR services like Visual IVR and IVR2Text that integrate voice with modern digital mediums for greater flexibility and efficiency.

Caller Intent

Understanding why customers are calling enables a high level of continuity of experience and reduces duplication of information and content. By properly organizing customer journey data and other related information, intelligent contact center software can not only identify callers, but based on other available data, also accurately predict the reason for their call, allowing callers to be routed to the best resource, whether that’s a live agent or IVR system. Understanding caller intent reduces time to resolution — and anytime solutions are found quickly, customers tend to be pleased.

Call Routing

One of the biggest time sucks comes from failing to route callers to the best resources for handling their concerns right away. Part of it is a residual effect of older, limited IVR systems that were not able to leverage speech recognition to more precisely recognize callers’ needs and direct them to the best agents. Modern solutions can leverage the entire customer journey, including previous calls, to route calls to the best available agents, not simply the next available agent.

Cloud Solutions – One of the benefits of cloud-based technology is its ability to be accessed anywhere there is network connectivity. Cloud contact center technology allows companies to hire agents anywhere in the world, allowing for 24/7 coverage without having to necessarily staff live agents during overnight hours or other slow periods.

Increase Efficiency and Reduce Costs, One Call at a Time

There are many ways modern contact centers can increase efficiency and reduce costs. Essentially, though, they all amount to leveraging a combination of data and omnichannel engagement to maximize the impact of every customer touchpoint.

This is an article provided by our partners network. It might not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of our editorial team and management.

Contributed content

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR