Simplify your tools to reduce your total cost of ownership.
The next step to enabling employee collaboration is all about simplifying your toolset.
Agents today spend too much time just navigating the communication hurdles they face. They are juggling several applications within a typical workday. This results in inefficiencies and redundancies in basic functions, and weeks to fully ramp. These lags have a direct negative impact on the customer experience by adding unnecessary complexity and friction.
For IT teams, multiple vendors mean more effort in managing multiple admin portals, reporting tools, multiple bills, and different support contacts. The collaboration solutions their organizations use often lack interoperability and require a heavy lift on the IT team to develop integrations to support the different applications.
With the urgency of suddenly getting remote teams operational behind them, IT leaders are now taking a more strategic look into their tools and evaluating if there are any points of interoperability or opportunities to eliminate redundancy.
Those that have eliminated redundant business apps and shifted to a cloud-based unified communication solution on average see savings of $161,000 annually. Among cost savings, moving to cloud-based applications also ensures teams remain agile and ready to scale up or down depending on business needs.
With a simplified tech stack also comes faster ramp time for employees and agents. This all leads to a reduced total cost of ownership.
Encourage knowledge sharing to increase revenue.
Without the free flow of customer insights and information across departments, companies cannot realize the full potential of company-wide employee collaboration.
A majority of CX leaders indicated that “positioning the contact center as a profit center for the business” was a priority for them. One way they are doing this is by including sales quotas as part of the agent KPI portfolio. However, it is important to build in a variable compensation model to encourage and motivate your teams to identify upsell opportunities, which in turn will help avoid any increase in agent attrition additional KPIs may cause.
In addition to the cost savings and increased profitability per customer that comes with true first contact resolution (FCR), organizations have the opportunity to not only solve an issue or question but to use the context from that discussion to position and upsell additional products and services.
Connecting with other employees within the organization allows contact center agents to follow through on upsell opportunities and put customers in touch with the right people inside the company to pitch and upsell new products and services.
There’s a more qualitative advantage of collaboration: the value that the contact center can bring to other departments. Contact center agents can deliver the voice of the customer across departments to influence marketing campaigns, product direction, or even identify areas of improvement for operations.
The contact center works with:
- Marketing. The contact center provides customer input on competitors that can influence a campaign.
- Product development. Contact centers highlight product compatibility issues and opportunities.
- Operations. Contact centers facilitate communication related to capacity or production problems.
Your contact center also has enormous potential to provide other business units with valuable insight and support. This can include input on customers, products, services, and processes—information that, when captured and used, can transform your ability to innovate, meet customer expectations, and provide great experiences leading to an increase in revenue.
If your contact center is using communications technology that’s completely siloed from the rest of the company, making it impossible or cumbersome for agents to find and access the right people with the right knowledge, Talkdesk can help you.
When you integrate your contact center communications tools with your unified communications tools, you enable employee collaboration, so teams can share knowledge and expertise across departments. In doing so, you will foster a customer-centric culture that drives real business results.