Don’t Isolate Your Contact Center

How do you define your contact center? Is it a place where customers go to get answers? Or is simply an operational switchboard, forwarding people to different departments?

Modern contact centers have gone through significant changes over the years. Customers expect more from companies, and this demand has forced contact centers to become more informed and proactive. To accommodate future demands, contact centers must break free from their operational silo and begin collaborating with other departments.

Calls are More Complex

Customers aren’t coming to contact centers with just easy questions anymore. According to ICMI, 73% of contact centers say they’ve witnessed an increase in difficult inbound requests. Today, customers have several self-support mediums they exhaust before calling. They search google, FAQs and other self-help sites. Then, when they have tried everything else, they call.

Failed Calls Create Lines

Contact centers are primed to address the common concerns. But what about the rare occurrences that require an expert? Complicated questions can cause significant delays as agents search for a proper answer. Even worse, if the agent provides a wrong answer, they may force callers back into the call queue. According to Service Quality Measurement Group, call-backs account for 32% of contact center call volume. 

Add Skype for Business to Your Contact Center

When agents run into problems, who can they turn to? If the contact center is its own, isolated entity, agents often force callers into a hold, to another departments voicemail or back into the IVR labyrinth. They delay the resolution for the customer, increase customer frustration and negatively impact the company bottom line.
 

But what if the contact center had real-time access to all other departments of the business? With a Skype for Business integration, contact center agents can view and access the subject matter experts across their organization. Agents can conference in experts, as they need them and provide suitable resolutions. No more guesswork. No more frustrated return callers.
 

Interested in how your company can leverage subject matter experts to improve your customer experience? Check out our e-book “Smarter Support for the Complex Conversations.” In our e-book we will explain how you can integrate Skype for Business with your contact center to facilitate a stronger support architecture through SMEs. We will outline how to optimize your solution and create a support strategy that improves resolution speed, customer retention and reduces operational effort.