Customer contact centers have always been the central points of customer interaction. During the pandemic, their importance has grown even more due to the fact that the people were obliged to stay at home. When thinking about the word, it refers to the connection companies establish with customers beyond using the telephone. In times when customers are looking for better experiences, personalized journeys, and getting the information they need in a matter of minutes, the transformation of traditional call centers is a prerequisite.
There is a notion that call centers and contact centers mean the same, but there is one huge difference. Call centers are mostly focused on receiving calls on traditional phone lines and contact centers on the other hand offer many other options for communicating with customers like e-mail, text chat, live support software, etc. In other words, call centers handle only voice communications while contact centers can take on all kinds of communications. Additionally, many companies integrate their internal systems related to customer tracking with their contact centers to manage customer data, deliver personalized experiences, offer synchronized service as well as analyze data.
Why contact centers instead of call centers?
There are several reasons why contact centers are way better than call centers. Following are some of the most important:
Real-time customer experience
Contact centers include a lot of features that help customers get a real-time experience by getting their calls distributed in the most efficient way, thus exploiting the number of answered calls whilst keeping customers satisfied. Using IVR is one great example of directing calls to the most suitable agent. In other words, the various expertise and knowledge your contact center’s agents possess is at the disposal of your callers in real time.
Omni-channel experience
This might be one of the most important features of contact centers. Customers want to experience consistent service no matter what channel they are using. Contact centers allow your call agent to transfer among channels easily, thus serving customers no matter what channel they use to establish contact. To put it simply, contact centers have one system that handles chats, e-mails, calls, etc., thus transforming your customer’s journey.
Flexibility
In the pursuit of the perfect customer journey, one thing is certain – you need flexibility and adaptability. Complying with the vast number of calls and various objectives is a must and can be achieved with a flexible contact center structure. That way sales representatives work as one even though they are using various channels, handle different calls, etc.
Reports in real-time
Measuring customer satisfaction using different channels can be challenging and complicated since they contain a lot of data which leads to difficulties in making conclusions and executing the right decisions. Customer contact centers track the experience the customer receives as well as the experience the sales agents deliver, in real time. However, it is important to decide on the most valuable performance indicators for your business so you can get the most out of them.
Common problems contact centers are facing
Though contact centers are better than call centers they can be faced with some challenges or problems throughout their work. Some of them are:
Language
The language barrier is one of the challenges that most contact centers are facing. It comes as a result of the fact that most of the contact centers are outsourcing models and are usually located far from the company.
Delivering the promised omnichannel experience
Delivering a consistent and integrated experience for customers over various channels is not that easy. Coordinating various teams is challenging and doesn’t always produce the desired results. For example, the people responsible for Facebook Messenger might not communicate with the people handling SMS messaging, which might lead to dissatisfied customers. For seamless customer experience, even the teams within your company should be synced in real-time.
Waiting time
Customers have come to want answers to their inquiries the moment they ask for them. No one wants to wait for an answer for a long time, which leads to customer churn. Thus, if your queuing system is not customized and it works automatically, the waiting time for the customer might be extended a lot.
Giving the requested answer
The best KPI for a successful contact center call is providing the answer a customer is looking for without having the customer reiterate his/her problems multiple times to multiple people, but that is not always the case. In cases when there is no information about the entire customer journey in detail, you can’t deliver the best customer experience.
Legacy infrastructure
Not upgrading your contact center and using one that is older than 10 years can be a huge mistake. This puts companies in a hard position because they have invested a lot in the contact center infrastructure and are now unwilling to make any updates due to being costly and taking too much time to be installed and modified, which eventually leads to a low-quality customer journey and frustrated sales agents.
Solution: Contact center in the cloud
How to ensure that you are using a contact center that transforms your customer’s journey? One of the safest alternatives lies in the word cloud. Yes, the cloud contact center is hosted on a server on the Internet and acts as a central place where all calls are being handled. When we talk about the cloud the first thing that comes to mind is of course Amazon. Amazon Customer Contact Centers enable interactions using e-mail, Facebook Messenger, voice, etc., and can be accessed from anywhere at any time. Deployment time is reduced to minutes and you don’t need huge capital investments to transform your customer’s journey or transform your legacy contact center.
Where to start? Find your contact center partner, who will guide you through the entire process, and will remain your support and maintenance partner even after the implementation of the contact center.
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