Part 1: Bridging the Gap Between Contact Center Agents and Subject Matter Experts

Cloud

Julian Tiongson Manager, Product Marketing

Julian Tiongson specializes in product marketing with emphasis on product messaging, positioning, and go-to market initiatives. He is a well-rounded marketer starting his early career from wide range of social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and has since transitioned into product marketing in the later stages. This has brought a unique position to his product marketing style with deeper understanding of the full customer life cycle.

May 19, 2021

Welcome to blog 1 of the Five9 UC Integration blog series! Shape

Let’s face it, agents don’t have all theanswers. They are often in situations where a customer is asking a question outside of their knowledge or training. At this point, an agent can do one of two things: put the customer on hold while the agent tries to find a subject matter expert (SME) who can help answer the question, or blind transfer to an expert who they think would know the answer. The end result: a very poor customer service experience.

In the last year, there was a wholesale move to a work-from-home model for businesses, making it even more difficult for agents to reach SMEs. Agents can no longer look around the office and see who is available to help. With agents and experts in different locations, it leaves customers on hold or, worse, having to call back a second or third time. This is where Five9 UC Integration comes into play to bridge the gap between contact center agents and subject matter experts in real time.

Let’s break it down into two sections:

First, Agent-Expert Consultation equips agents to see availability and identify the right subject matter expert – anywhere in the organization. Traditionally, there has been a distinct separation between the contact center and back-office workers. However, as services and products become more complex, the burden of agent training has limited agent knowledge across familiar 80/20 lines—leaving customers with less common questions to receive a poor experience. With Agent-Expert Consultation, agents have the ability to use a consolidated Five9 and UC directory to easily find an expert, click-to-call, conference, or transfer in directly with the customer. Agents no longer have to place customers on hold—leaving them to wonder what is going on—or transfer the call to the wrong expert.

Second, Telephony Connect offers a cloud-to-cloud integration to support on-net calling and transfers. Utilizing this network allows your business to automatically redirect calls from the general number to the contact center, a particular skills group, or even directed to an expert who is outside of the contact center – without incurring additional toll charges. In addition to help keep costs lower from a business perspective, this also provides the correct call path for customers who are looking for a particular expert.

As Five9 helps your organization bridge the gap between agents and experts, your customers will feel the direct effects: a more seamless customer service experience, accelerated resolutions, and time savings due to improved first contact resolution (FCR).

Learn more about improving FCR in our white paper, “The Five9 Guide to First Contact Resolution.”

Tune in next week for blog #2 in the series, to learn how you can increase efficiency through a contact center and unified communications integration.