How Digital is Improving Customer Experience in Call Centers

Bring your ACD to the cloud to enjoy the digital transformation

ACDs, the good-enough for the not-bold-enough. We’ve written about what to know about Automatic Call Distributors, but times change and so do contact center’s needs and customers’ expectations. Nowadays, the simple ACD has limited functionality and it’s not enough to keep up with the constant evolution.

Thanks to the fast-paced digital transformation, the telephony system that merely answers incoming calls and routes them based on pre-defined information is a thing from the past. With an ACD, calls are distributed based on an algorithm that takes into account information like the phone number the caller dialed, IVR configurations, agent availability, and business rules. It’s better than just a general phone number with no distribution, but still… most ACDs lack intelligence! This is where digital transformation helps.

Combine customer experience with efficiency

Customer experience means to be there when and where your customers need you, so wouldn’t it be great to connect the ACD to the myriad of communication channels that customers want? Wouldn’t it be useful to integrate with other management systems that would reduce the workload? Wouldn’t it be awesome if agents had more time to answer calls and supervisors to manage teams, respectively, instead of wasting time with repetitive tasks and heavy processes?

This is how you will transform challenges into opportunities: constant innovation drives customer satisfaction and efficiency!

Use Social Media for Customer Support

Source: J.D. Power

Stop those angry calls from customers saying they’ve contacted you through multiple channels. Customers are right there, already following you and talking to you. So why force them to call if they prefer to engage on social media? Most probably they will call once they are already unhappy and just want to escalate the problem. 

There is no reason you shouldn’t take the opportunity and boost that customer experience immediately. Also, if they are in their preferred channel, they are certainly more comfortable and will most probably be more available to other actions. How is your performance on those cross-sell and up-sell targets?

Also, 42% of consumers expect a response on social media within 60 minutes. If you have high targets to keep queue times low, get your customers out of the landline and use that motivation on social media!

Get profit from better customer experiences

Source: Salesforce

Customer service expectations are on the rise and cloud contact center solutions are the modern and future promise to deliver big results. CRM integration and scalable microservices architecture and automatic system upgrades just scratch the surface of modern cloud contact center benefits. 

The ultimate goal of a contact center nowadays should be to equip agents, supervisors, and customers with intelligent tools to advance customer support and make every contact valuable, taking the customer experience to the next level. Consumers would pay up to 16% more for better customer experience, and that’s what separates good from bad contact centers, good from bad customer support, increased or decreased sales… You get the picture. 

After all, if 72% of businesses say that improving the customer’s experience is their top priority, why shouldn’t you focus on that too?

CCaaS brings new ways to improve customer experience

Source: Dimension Data

Digital transformation is no longer a simple buzzword nor just a promise, its the way to the future and it’s deeply changing businesses now and forever, for better. Digital transformation is creating new market opportunities and driving new business models for companies. It’s time to adopt technological changes and fight for growth and opportunity.

One of the first adoptions contact centers can make is to adopt a cloud contact center solution (CCaaS). Due to the constant updates and stream of new features, it’s the perfect scenario for innovation. For example, speech analytics, a mobile app for agents and integration with multiple channels are all intrinsic features of a cloud-native contact center solution that drive customer experience and customer satisfaction levels.

Let agents and supervisors get more value from their time

Source: MIT

One of the best gifts that digital transformation has accelerated is artificial intelligence.

Can you imagine how much time an agent would save if, when the customer asks “I want to change my appointment”, the agent gets a pop-up with the link to do that? What when the customer asks “When will my order arrive?”, the agent automatically sees the shipping status?

It’s all about giving agents and supervisors what they need at the right moment, effectively. When agents and supervisors waste time on processes and searching for information, they are not spending valuable time with customers. 

State-of-the-art cloud-native solutions include artificial intelligence, this cutting-edge seamless layer that smoothly runs in the background, revealing insights and presenting recommendations so supervisors focus on effortlessly supervising, and agents focus on pushing customer satisfaction. 

Deliver positive customer experiences through innovation

Source: IDC

While plans to innovate in the future are a good next step for legacy providers, nothing performs better in the cloud than a cloud-native solution – and consumers will notice the difference. 

Do you know how likely companies are to have a formal “no-cloud” policy in place come 2020? According to Gartner, the answer is 0%.

Just like there isn’t a “no-internet” policy.

What are you waiting for?

Enjoy the wealth of benefits that come with digital transformation – efficiency, agility, cost savings, ongoing innovation, and better customer experience – in a risk-free cloud deployment that protects your legacy ACD investments.