It’s as true now as it has been for decades: the customer always comes first. One of the most important things a business can do is develop strong relationships with its customers, and contact centers are the front lines of that effort.
Companies the world over are constantly searching for new ways to maximize their call center experience, but such a task is always easier said than done. If you want to upgrade your contact center, you need to know the ins-and-outs of how it works first. The better your customer call center experience is, the more successful your business will be — and it all starts with your contact center.
What is a contact center?
For as long as businesses have existed, customers have been getting in touch with them. As technology has advanced, more and more methods of company-customer communication have been established, making these kinds of interactions more difficult to manage.
The contact center is the place where all of this communication is centralized and managed. Today, customers may get in touch over the phone, via email, through instant messaging, or using a tool built into your platform. By bringing all of these channels into one place, they can be streamlined and moved between with ease.
What’s the difference between a contact center and a call center?
When most people think of customer service, they’re likely imagining some form of a call center: a place where disgruntled customers shout at someone holding a phone and reading from a script.
In reality, call centers are one part of the larger contact center system. Whereas traditional call centers manage everything from the phone, contact centers make calls one portion of a larger system of support.
The defining feature of the modern call center is its integration with technology: cloud-based contact centers allow customer experience experts to call upon client data and produce valuable performance reports in real time. By combining standard call center infrastructure with cutting-edge software, contact centers are paving the way for a more human customer experience.
The Call Center Experience
While you may have a grasp on the workings of your contact center, every company curates a different customer experience strategy. In order to further develop the way your business handles its clients, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of what makes a contact center function.
How does a contact center work?
The goal of any contact center is simple: provide the best possible experience for the customer. Businesses may go about this in different ways, but the gist is typically the same: accurately identify the customer’s needs, then fulfill those needs or direct them to someone who can.
In today’s business landscape, customers have more diverse needs and more diverse ways of expressing them than ever before. Contact centers work by making it as easy as possible for your customer service representatives to hear and solve the problems of your customers. Communication comes in and is sorted electronically before being appropriately distributed.
Types of contact centers
Every contact center is structured differently, but there are a few common layouts that make up the vast majority. Here are some that you should be aware of:
Cloud-based contact teams
Cloud-based contact centers are quickly becoming the gold standard for customer experience management. These contact centers are hosted from a remote internet server and are therefore accessible anywhere by anyone who has the appropriate credentials — allowing you to create a cohesive workflow across different offices and remote teams without having to worry about any physical maintenance.
On-site contact centers
In contrast to their cloud-based counterparts, on-site contact centers are hosted on physical servers held and maintained by your company. While keeping everything in-house can allow for some added security, opting for on-site options requires you to have an all-star IT department that can ensure everything runs smoothly.
Multichannel call centers
If you think of a call center as a single-channel contact center, then any contact center that incorporates one or more distinct lines of customer communication is a multichannel one. Multichannel contact centers allow your team to manage several different fronts while still specializing in just a few.
Omnichannel call centers
Omnichannel contact centers, on the other hand, bring all of your different routes of customer communication — calls, email, IMs, and so on — into a single place. The goal of all omnichannel consolidation is seamlessness: if your workers can handle customers who are coming at them from every possible angle, then your contact center is working effectively.
Inbound contact centers
Inbound contact centers are the kinds that those working in customer service will be most familiar with: calls come in and are dealt with thereafter. The purpose of an inbound call center is to deal with customers’ queries as they come up and respond to any problems they may have.
Outbound contact centers
Outbound contact centers are normally reserved for teams interested in making calls directly to customers or potential clients, such as sales. Increasingly, outbound calls have become a crucial part of the customer experience through surveys, follow-ups, and preemptive customer check-ins — showing customers that they’re appreciated by your business.
While each different style of contact center listed here has different requirements and capabilities, a contact center can easily be a mix of two or more of these at a time. Many omnichannel contact centers, for example, have both inbound and outbound capabilities.
What technology does a call center need?
Call center software is constantly evolving, and the list of “must-haves” will be different for every business. Even so, a few key pieces of tech remain crucial for building and maintaining a high quality call center experience:
Automatic call distribution
Automatic call distribution, or ACD, is technology’s greatest gift to the outdated call center model. ACD analyzes calls based on the number dialed, customer requests, and available representatives in order to funnel all incoming queries to the right place. Even in an increasingly digital world, customers want to communicate over the phone, and your business needs ACD in order to facilitate that.
Interactive video
For many companies’ products and services, talking over the phone or via email simply won’t suffice — a video connection is required to get your customers the help they need. Interactive video platforms allow both your customers and employees to share their screens and respond to dynamic prompts regarding what their next steps should be, making it easy to solve tough problems on the fly.
Call transcription
For omnichannel contact centers, there needs to be a way to get all forms of communication sorted into a single format. Going back and listening through old calls can be a time-consuming exercise, so your call center needs to be automatically transcribing every call that comes in. Post facto analysis of these calls can make future interactions more successful and allows for increased accountability as well.
Chatbot integrations
Nearly every business today with a digital platform has incorporated some kind of chatbot to boost customer engagement, but your company should go one step further. Integrate your chatbots seamlessly into your contact center by allowing your actual customer experience experts to jump into chatbot conversations when necessary — allowing them to answer difficult questions and keep engagement levels high.
Knowledge management systems
Simply put, every business needs a centralized location to store all of the information their customer service representatives might need to draw upon. A system of knowledge management can make it easy for all of the necessary employees to access whatever content they need to make life better for both them and your customers.
Improving the Call Center Experience
Knowing the nuts and bolts of contact centers is absolutely necessary, but what does it all add up to? Cutting-edge technology and omnichannel structures mean nothing if they’re not being used to create a better call center experience for the customer.
Making it human
With all of the focus on technology and efficiency, it can be easy to turn your call center experience into a clinical process — customers identified, tagged, and moved to wherever they need to be.
No matter what format your contact center takes or what software you adopt for it, be sure to continue to put the customer first above all else. Maximize opportunities for human interaction, value your customers’ time, and listen as much as possible.
Using technology responsibly
Instead of using tech to get customers in and out the door as fast as possible, try using it to personalize and humanize the experience. Invest in software that allows your customer service representatives to know your customers’ names and history with your company in advance. Emphasize voice and video whenever possible; make it clear that they’re always dealing with humans.
Don’t just let the end of a call be the end of an interaction, either — use outbound technologies to check up on customers, see how they’re feeling about your service. Your customers aren’t just abstract numbers and figures: they’re potential relationships for you to nurture and cultivate.
Every person who interacts with your contact center is just that: a person. By treating your customers with the respect and humanity that they deserve, you’ll be building a more grateful and loyal clientele in the process.
