The age of the old-fashioned “call center” is over. The business landscape for customer service, support, and sales is no longer simply a room filled with ringing phones. Instead, companies need something more comprehensive to ensure customer satisfaction, outshine the competition, and thrive in a digital age. The era of the “contact center” is here.
The contact center as we know it today is an omnichannel environment designed to align conversations across a host of channels, from social media to text and video.
These flexible landscapes empower modern consumers to access the support they need, wherever they want to access it. What’s more, the modern contact center also ensures the customer service agent can deliver a better quality of service through a unified, easy-to-use interface.
The Transition from Call to Contact Center
The migration from the old-fashioned call center to the modern contact center has been necessary for modern brands. Studies show consumers are evolving. Around two-thirds of consumers prefer to look for solutions to problems themselves before contacting customer support. Around 70% of customers also say they prefer to use various channels when seeking answers.
The contact center converts the phone-based ecosystem for customer service and support into a global resource, where customers can access the assistance, they need in a convenient environment. In this new landscape, contact center agents aren’t just bodies answering phones; they’re crucial brand representatives, responsible for success of the customer journey, and delivering a consistent, branded, and personal experience anywhere.
Unlike the call center, the contact center is:
- Omnichannel: Capable of aligning and supporting conversations across various channels (from text and chat to audio and video).
- Aligned: Ready to provide end-to-end insights into the customer journey and minimize the time agents spend moving between apps.
- Data-driven: A comprehensive contact center environment ensures complete visibility into the customer journey, so teams can use data and insights to make crucial service decisions.
What Do Companies Need to Transition to the Contact Center?
The evolution from call center to contact center brings a new demand for technology agents can use to navigate a new ecosystem of service and support. Your agents need the right infrastructure environment to succeed. Today’s contact center agents need:
A unified inbox:
An essential part of the modern “contact center” the unified, single-view interface ensures your agent can access the various channels you’re using to reach your customer in one place. This environment also makes it possible to track the multiple elements of a conversation with a client from one channel to the next.
A desktop wallboard solution for your agents ensure they can track everything from inbound calls to priority messages in one, easy to see location (no matter where they are working from). What’s more, they can use the same technology to access information about customers and deliver more personalized experiences.
KPI-based management
Business leaders, managers, and supervisors need to track the performance of their teams and ensure the contact center is running smoothly to ensure customer satisfaction. Leadership can track if team members are keeping up with KPI benchmarks and reaching essential goals through a management wallboard dashboard.
Tracking crucial metrics will ensure that management teams can make vital changes to everything from team scheduling to contact center routing strategies.
Real-time information
Today’s customers expect the modern contact center to be an omnichannel environment, capable of serving their needs no matter their communication preferences. However, these clients also expect faster solutions to their problems and a higher quality of service.
With access to real-time information, agents in the contact center can ensure they’re keeping up with customer expectations.
Agent dashboards can even show team members if they’re performing in line with the rest of the team when it comes to metrics like number of calls, answers, or messages resolved in the contact center. The same information delivered to managers can inform supervisors when they might need to step in and assist with a customer interaction to prevent a discussion from going south.
Empowering the Contact Center with Wallboards
Wallboards and agent dashboards offer companies to transition from the “call center” to the “contact center” with a unified environment for tracking conversations and crucial metrics. Now more than ever, as more employees move into the “hybrid” model for work, these wallboards are becoming increasingly essential to keeping teams on the right track.
Data-driven insights and real-time information ensure businesses can adapt to the new age of the “contact center” without compromising on exceptional customer experiences.
