High-quality customer service is a necessity for building a strong customer-brand relationship. Improving the experience for both agents and customers results in more productive interactions, rewarded with recurring customer business.
According to a study conducted by Hubspot, 93% of people were more likely to be repeat customers at companies with excellent customer service.
It’s important to equip your contact center with the right tools to deliver an efficient and pleasant customer experience. Integrating the right apps can help achieve this goal, giving you a better understanding of your team’s productivity and the customer journey.
The modern contact center
Customer support has moved beyond just being a call center. A modern contact center is the hub for customer communications across multiple platforms such as text, social media, chat, email, and voice. Contact center agents need to be more adaptable than ever before with a host of new ways of communicating.
Organization is key to having a successful contact center that results in happy customers and agents that aren’t overwhelmed. Technology has helped streamline the customer support process, allowing businesses to do much more with less.
Modern contact center solutions use the latest technology to get the most functionality out of your customer support team. Some of these features include:
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Customer experience management (CEM)
- Workforce optimization (WFO)
- Omnichannel communication
The right contact center software can scale to your business, offering a frictionless experience for your agents that allows them to give informed yet concise and effective customer support.
Integrating a contact center with CRMs and other applications
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform helps track your customer or client data by connecting all your departments and helping organize information. It’s an easy and intuitive way to maintain customer relationships.
CRMs put your sales history, support, and important meetings with your customers all in one place, giving your contact center the ability to deliver a more personalized experience. Having a detailed dossier on your customers leads to better understanding of their needs, meaning your agents can connect your customers to the right resources in a timely manner.
Once you’ve implemented your CRM, it can be easily connected to your contact center. A modern contact center can pull in your CRM data, plus information from other business apps, to give agents valuable context for each interaction.
That means they can access everything they need all in one place, from project management to spreadsheets to CRM details and any other resources, all without interrupting their workflows.
A contact center can be integrated with a wide range of industry-leading applications across many categories, so your agents can be more productive and your customers more satisfied with the quality of their interactions, including:
- Cloud storage and file management: For accessing and sharing files across your company
- Support desks: For online web support and live chat
- Collaboration software: Allowing you to work closely with your team via voice, video, and messaging
- Project management software: Helping you keep track of ongoing projects and tasks
- And many more
Contact center solutions let agents apply this valuable data when communicating with customers via messaging, conferencing tools, and other channels. Your agents will no longer have to waste time navigating dozens of windows and tabs to find what they need.
Integrating AI into the contact center
A Cisco Global Contact Center Survey found that 76% of contact center agents agree that working through technology or process issues is their greatest challenge. The implementation of artificial intelligence in your organization’s contact center can circumvent a lot of these issues by:
- Offloading simple or common inquiries
- Reducing customer wait times
- Offering 24/7 business access
- Allowing your agents to serve customers more efficiently
Integrating AI can lead to more cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and empower you to identify trends through valuable data analysis. Customers can have simple issues solved quickly with AI in the form of voice or chatbots, leaving agents open to help customers with more complex matters. AI can increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve the overall customer experience.
Experience management and workforce optimization integrations
Webex Experience Management allows you to gain insight into your customers’ journeys through predictive analytics; ticketing systems; financial, journey path, and theme analysis.
It can help you visualize performance through customer journey maps and inform data-driven decisions with key metrics and actionable insights. Most importantly, this system allows customer feedback to be heard and handled in real-time, keeping you in the loop every step of the way.
Workforce optimization applications give supervisors the ability to manage team performance through call recording and quality management, and data and analytics to facilitate the ideal customer experience.
Managing team performance will allow you to identify where your agents are making strides and what causes them to slow down, empowering you to optimize the experience going forward. The customer journey doesn’t end at the point of purchase; you want to keep them coming back, and that can hinge on great customer service.
Contact one of our contact center experts today to receive a personalized demo and learn more about how Webex Contact Center is optimizing customer experience around the world.
Learn more
Embedding the power of data in contact centers to create super agents
What is a cloud contact center?
Exceeding expectations with Webex customer experience solutions [Blog]
Cisco + IMImobile: Delivering the Future of Customer Experience, Together [Blog]
The Future of Customer Experience Begins Now [Blog]
Webex Contact Center [Website]
Webex Contact Center [Recorded Webinar]
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