Do your customers get stuck waiting in long call queues due to your high call volumes? Does your queue depth consistently respond with QFULL? Are you spending too much when Erlang C overestimates your staff requirements? High call volumes result in a bad experience for your customer, who gets annoyed waiting in a long queue and for your agent who has to work with a customer that's already low on patience.
Investing in technologies such as cloud call centers can reduce your call volumes and improve customer experience. This service benefits both your customers and your business operations, which helps you find the balance between cost and efficiency. Channel diversity is a key feature of today's call center. By offering alternative channels for your customers to connect with you, such as chat and social media, you can reduce your call volumes and improve customer experience by communicating with them on their preferred channel.
Customers today are presented with diverse options for communicating with companies. Before voice was the primary channel for communication, but the dominance of the voice communication channel will decrease 17% in 2019 falling to 47%.
Chat, messaging, and social media are positioned to fill that gap with social media rates predicted to double in 2019 as a channel for customer service. This can be an enormous pain point or a great opportunity for your agents depending on the tools they have to work with.
For instance, legacy agent desktop software often is not capable of chat integration. On the other hand, a cloud call center allows your agents to seamlessly switch conversations from social media to chat to the phone – enabling your customers to start the conversation on their preferred channel and empowering your agent to escalate them to other channels if needed.
Artificial Intelligence has made significant technological advancements and now possess the capabilities to warrant a strategic contact center investment. AI chatbots assist your customers through basic transactions, like updating contact information or changing subscription plans. This will free up your agents to handle more complex customer requests.
When integrated with the Internet of Things, these technologies have the potential to help your call center become more proactive. Your contact centers can receive alerts from sensors that monitor the state of machines to detect when maintenance or repairs are needed.
Call center supervisors receive accurate insights of agent-customer communications based on real-time reporting. Your staff can be optimized for any scenario you might encounter by analyzing data such as average call times and resolutions rates.
This data is also useful to train new agents or retrain agents who spend too much time on calls or have been struggling to improve resolutions.
Empower your agents with complete access to customer profiles and history. CRM integrations allow your agents to quickly understand the customer who is calling and communicate more effectively with them by viewing their purchase history and other information. Personalizing these interactions makes for a better customer experience and allows agents to resolve issues faster.
Call centers are undergoing radical changes globally. From omnichannel communications to personalized interactions, customer expectations are at an all-time high. Cloud call center solutions can help you tackle the challenge and deliver stellar customer experiences while reducing call volumes.