What contact centres need to deliver great CX

The customer service landscape is an area of continual change. According to Linda Dias of Talkdesk, we’ve moved on from having agents just answering phone calls to handling multiple customer touchpoints. As well as solving customers’ queries, today’s contact centres are expected to contribute to a positive customer experience.

To do this successfully, we need technology. But with limited budgets, what features should contact centres focus on to deliver a great customer experience?

In her informative blog post, Linda Dias lists the top 8 must-have tools and features that call centres can’t do without if they want to deliver a great CX.

These are:

1. Interactive Voice Response System (IVR)

IVR is a telephony menu system that provides caller identification and routes the call to the most appropriate agent. IVR ensures all calls are handled, and callers are always routed to the correct agent, increasing efficiency and first call resolution (FCR)

2. Cloud-Based Contact Centre Software

According to Linda, this is the foundation of modern contact centres. Cloud-based contact centre software, also called cloud solutions, guarantees that agents all use the same technology and access the same level of information. This ensures that quality standards are maintained, regardless of where the agent is located.

Cloud-based contact centre software can also integrate with third-party systems such as CRM, giving agents access to additional information sources and interact with customers via their preferred channels, including voice and digital.

3. Real-Time Analytics

Real-time dashboards can show data such as service levels, the number of calls in a queue and average hold time. This gives your team real-time metrics so they can make timely decisions, perform to their best ability and improve the customer experience.

4. Call Monitoring, Whisper Coaching and Call Barging

With remote and hybrid working becoming increasingly popular, onboarding and training agents is challenging for contact centre managers and supervisors.

Training tools that require minimal effort but still provide information for excellent customer service are therefore essential for supervisors and new agents.

For Linda Dias, there are 3 ‘must-have’ features for management teams wanting to increase performance:

• Call monitoring – Lets the manager discretely listen in on live calls without the agent or caller knowing. This is handy for training and quality assurance purposes.

• Whisper coaching – Allows managers to coach an agent through a call without the caller knowing. This helps train new agents and supports established agents through difficult calls.

• Call barging – Lets managers listen in without the agent or caller knowing, but with the additional feature of enabling them to ‘drop’ in on the call if the agent is struggling or the caller asks to speak to a manager.

5. Call Conferencing

This is a valuable feature as it allows agents to conference with another department or agent if they need support on their call without having to transfer the call. This increases the chance of first call resolution, enables agents to coach less experienced colleagues, and improves team collaboration.

6. Call Recording

Allows managers and supervisors to monitor each agent, irrespective of time zone or location, listen to recorded calls and provide valuable feedback.

7. Automation

Automation and AI (artificial intelligence) play an important role in customer service. Contact centre automation entails simple workflows that automate tasks and improve productivity by freeing agents from non-call tasks such as survey emails. They can also be customer facing features such as self-service chatbots.

8. Integrated Business Tools

Integrating with other systems and software increases agents’ productivity and boosts customer satisfaction (CSAT) as it allows customer data to be gathered from different sources and displayed in a single workspace.

You can read the full post here.

If you need help with your call centre technology, CX strategy, systems or service, get in touch, we're here to help.