Nothing stays the same in the business world. Every day, new technologies emerge, changing the competitive landscape, and there is always a need to keep up with new trends. It is a surprise, but technologies have even made their way into contact center teams. Thus, they have even become a guarantee for good customer service. You may not believe it, but 75% of clients prefer a business with good customer service.
So, what is the first modern technology you can add to answer customers’ questions and concerns? What comes to your mind? Will it be AI-powered chatbots or data collection? This article is for you if you need help finding the tools and technologies your contact center may need.
We will uncover what technologies to use to optimize contact center performance and why it is essential. So, if you are ready, let’s start.
What is Contact Center Optimization?
Before discussing the ins and outs of optimizing contact center performance, we need to ensure we are on the same page and understand what contact center optimization is.
Contact center optimization ensures that all the operations are streamlined and performed promptly. It improves the responses to customer inquiries via phone, emails, or chats by collecting data and insights using modern technologies and cost-effectively implementing the process.
A contact center is a more complex entity than a call center. While a call center is meant only to provide support to clients via phone, the contact center oversees all communication channels.
That’s why it is essential to enhance the contact center’s performance and troubleshoot any
issues or problems in an advanced way to increase customer satisfaction.
However, this is just one of the many reasons why contact center optimization is needed. We suggest dwelling a bit more on this point.
Why is contact center optimization important?
The essence of optimization is to use all resources to their maximum capacity. Contact center optimization reduces the efforts and time spent on redundant tasks and shifts the work of the contact center employees into tasks that need more attention and human touch.
Improving the performance of contact center employees is crucial because their work shapes clients’ perceptions of your brand. With the help of optimization and proper tools, employees will have more resources to spend on resolving clients’ issues easily, thus conveying an overall positive image of the company to the audience.
Plus, optimization is cost-saving. You may think you need additional human resources and employees, but you only need a proper team structure and tools to optimize the work without wasting finances.
How to Perform a Contact Center Optimization
Now you know why contact center optimization is essential. But we have to answer the primary question of our article: How do we perform optimization?
To answer this, we first mention that optimization is an ongoing process. However, there are several basic steps that you can take to begin optimizing. The first step is identifying the customer’s wants, so let’s start there.
Listen to Customer Feedback and Drive Data
Customers do not only talk to you; they also talk about you. In other words, they leave reviews and feedback on various platforms about your services and how you handle their complaints and questions. Their feedback is a gold mine for collecting data about the areas that need to be improved in your contact center’s performance.
Yet, the feedback is left on various platforms; meanwhile, you can ask them to leave their opinion and structure it. From there, you can discover tendencies, how you respond to escalations, and what training the employees need to handle everyday situations and issues.
Remember that you may implement AI to structure the data correctly, identify common patterns in the client’s behavior, and suggest ways to address them. AI can also analyze clients’ emotions and suggest solutions from an extensive database.
However, this is just one way AI can assist your contact center. So why not look closely at what tools you can use and how you can utilize AI?
Use Automation Where Possible
When we mention AI, we cannot miss the AI chatbots. AI has long passed the stage of providing simple, short, robotic answers to questions. Currently, it is capable of handling far more complex tasks. It can create a logo, fake a voice, or write movie scripts to handle conversations with your customers.
With the help of natural language processing (NLP) and reinforcement learning with human feedback(RLHF) techniques, chatbot communication better reflects the human language, restructuring its language to fit into it and learning better how to respond to specific cases. For example, if clients ask them a specific question and they lack the knowledge to answer it, you can provide them with feedback and enhance their database, and the next time, they will address the issue based on your review.
However, AI is not the only technological advancement you can implement. Also, consider using transcription technologies.
Transcription allows you to record audio and then get the textual version of the conversation. This allows you to analyze the phone interactions that employees have with clients and collect data that can be helpful for training purposes. You may not believe it, but 41.2% of professionals rely on phone calls to communicate with their clients. So, enhancing phone call communication can be a good strategy for keeping your customers happy.
AI and transcription can decrease the workload of contact center employees. AI can leave a heavy portion of conversations to chatbots, and with transcriptions, you may design cheat sheets for the employees.
But you must remember to balance technology and human touch. A human touch shows customers that you care about them. Plus, there is a way to make communications easy and professional, with a human touch, and that way is a consistent style.
Make Sure Your Emails Get Send
Estimations show that around 27.7% got spam from submissions. This means that a considerable portion of emails that you can get from customers may be fake or spammy.
So, you must check the emails your clients provide you with. In order to make sure that your emails will get to the recipients and you will be able to communicate with them. Also, you will not have to deal with issues such as bounce rate, which can harm your sender’s reputation.
Keep Consistency In Communication
Consistency is another optimization strategy. In addition to using automation and tools, a consistent approach preserves the human factor and leverages employees’ work. How? By using templates and scripts.
For example, if the client has just joined your company or signed up for the newsletter, you may have premade onboarding emails that you can send out to them. These emails will help them learn in-depth about your services and the next steps they need to take. Remember that the onboarding email is one of the first interactions the customer will have with your brand, and you have to leave an impression and make them memorize you. So, add your brand elements logo design and maintain an overall tone of voice that you use in other brand materials.
You may even use email marketing software to schedule emails and create templates.
In the screenshot below, you can see an example of an onboarding email.
Screenshot taken from https://images.app.goo.gl/Hfdde25jMDAoPzta6
Also, remember that you can personalize the templates according to the customers’ needs. This will add a special touch to the messages involving the names of the clients, maybe their job positions, which will make them feel like you have really taken the time and invested efforts in addressing their concerns.
Every customer is unique, just like every contact center. You just need to find the proper approach to both and how to address their issues.
Conclusion
We have reached the end of our article. We hope our insights and guidance will help you on your journey to optimizing contact center operations. Remember that the steps you will take have to fit into the structure of your contact center and your clients’ needs so that you will drive success.
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