It’s common knowledge these days that customer service management is as important as the quality of products and services that brands offer. A HubSpot study states that 93% of customers are more likely to buy products from brands offering excellent customer service. In addition, according to the 2020 BVA Customer Service Observatory, 74% of consumers are willing to spend more or show more loyalty when offered a positive experience with customer service. To provide quality customer service, companies must be equipped with a reliable and robust contact center solution (or call center solution) to handle all inbound and outbound contacts with their prospects or customers. Here are the 10 essential features for a great contact center.
The idea behind IVR is simple: it allows customers who call to choose among many options corresponding to different types of requests. It’s the famous:
Interactive voice response is a vital feature for guaranteeing a 24/7 phone reception. It qualifies call reasons so as to direct your prospects and customers toward the best wait queue and allow an agent to personalize his answer. The IVR also enables activity peak management and facilitates self-service: simple requests may be handled by the customer himself—such as checking one’s balance or bill payment, for example—without agent assistance, allowing the agent to dedicate time to more complex requests.
Intelligent routing by skill routes inbound calls directly to the most qualified agent available. Whether it be according to a language spoken, expertise, or a specific product, the call is directed to the agent who is most capable of offering a clear and quick answer. The ACD therefore reduces wait time considerably for each inbound call and improves customer satisfaction as well as productivity.
The digitalization of customer service, greatly accelerated in 2020, now requires mastering new customer service channels. Although customers still prefer phone and email, they also contact brands through other communication channels such as SMS, web forms, chat, instant messaging, and social media. It is therefore essential for your contact center solution to be omnichannel, and it must centralize all customer service channels in a single interface. This way, your agents will have a 360° view of customer history and interactions and may unify communication on all channels.
To identify customers quickly and offer them personalized answers, your call center solution must integrate easily with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or your industry tools (ticketing systems, helpdesk, payment system). Identifying customers quickly in your IVR or enriching your customer data are among the many options possible with a CRM and contact center solution integration for guaranteeing the quality of your customer service.
Pop-up files (or customer file pop-ups) allow your teams to take advantage of all necessary customer information before even taking a call. This feature is made possible by the integration of the call center solution with a CRM and enables the personalization of each conversation with a customer as well as an agent’s responses. It can take note of the customer’s account, display customer history, review previous interactions, and therefore deliver personalized customer service.
According to Gartner, contact center spending on the cloud will represent 88% of investments between now and 2024. This cloud migration was greatly accelerated by the widespread adoption of remote working, and it is especially adapted to companies’ need for flexibility. If your teams work across multiple sites, or if you need to adapt your resources according to current events, a cloud contact center solution is what you need. If, on the other hand, you need to integrate your call center with old information systems or make specific developments, on-premise solutions will be a better fit.
The outbound call dialer allows you to automatically place calls from a predetermined list of phone numbers—from a CRM or directly loaded in the call center solution. It is generally available in three dialing modes: preview, progressive, and predictive. Essential for teleprospecting, web lead callbacks, order follow-ups, bill reminders, meeting reminders, and satisfaction surveys, it allows you to choose your call strategy to maximize the reachability rates of your contacts. A robust automated dialer is a vital tool for increasing agent productivity and having successful campaigns.
Call recording allows you to save phone conversations between your teams and your customers or prospects in order to listen them later. This feature is of utmost importance for agent training. When striving to offer quality service, listening to their calls allows them to identify points of progress, possible obstacles, and reasons for customer dissatisfaction. Recorded phone calls can also serve a legal purpose in case of litigation with a customer.
To oversee the overall activity of a call center, real-time supervision is an essential feature. Through customizable dashboards available in real time, your supervisors have access at a glance to all the key indicators, allowing them to make quick decisions: agents online, customers waiting, agents available or on a break, etc. Other supervision techniques—discreet listening, whispering, conferencing, internal chat—allow agents to develop their efficiency and performance.
The average response time, the AHT (average handling time), the FCR (first contact resolution rate), the CRR (customer retention rate), and the average pickup rate are among the many key performance indicators that speak for the quality of your customer service. To optimize your KPIs, rich reports are an essential asset for overseeing customer satisfaction and must be an important factor to consider when choosing your call center solution.
To optimize customer satisfaction and deliver quality customer service, Vocalcom offers an intuitive and flexible call center solution that adapts to your needs. Our all-in-one cloud solution gives you all the keys to offer both flawless customer service on all interaction channels and increase the impact of your outbound call campaigns.
