Making Contact Center Services Work for You

You might have an excellent product and outstanding marketing. However, if your customer service is lacking, your business will struggle.

Recent statistics show that 60% of customers would switch to a competitor after a single negative experience. In fact, the quality of your service only becomes more important as customer support requests increase.

How can contact center services help your business perform at its peak and satisfy your customers? Take a closer look at how to make contact center services work for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Contact centers manage your customer interactions in one convenient setup that is superior to traditional call centers.
• Contact center services offer multiple benefits, including cost savings, better customer data, and greater customer satisfaction.
• IVR, advanced analytics, call routing, and other contact center technologies help you improve your customer service.
• You can customize a cloud contact center to meet your organization’s needs.

What Contact Center Services Do for Your Company

A contact center is a department that handles all of your organization’s customer interactions. Your primary channel can be voice calls, but you also have access to all other digital communications.

Your company should use contact center services to assist and support customers efficiently. A well-run contact center allows you to distinguish yourself from the competition in the way that means the most to clients – the customer experience.

The Key Differences Between Contact Center Services and Call Centers

Contact center services are the superior choice because customers can reach you via phone, email, web chat, and text messaging through a single provider. Call centers only handle accepting and forwarding voice calls to the correct branch or department.

Customers prefer to work with companies across various channels. Surveys even find that buyers would switch from a brand that doesn’t offer text messaging communications to one that does.

Even though many customers still prefer phone calls, a growing number opt for other means to connect. Interestingly, these alternatives report higher customer satisfaction scores than voice calls.

In addition, contact centers can more easily integrate with advanced business software. With these integrations, you can boost your efficiency, security, and flexibility.

Benefits of Contact Center Services

When you set up contact center services, you gain numerous advantages that allow you to provide the best service your company can offer.

Get More Customer Data

The automated features in your contact center are able to gather vital customer data on each interaction. This information allows your team to personalize interactions and service clients more quickly. Additionally, you can use advanced tools to analyze large amounts of data and improve your training.

Save Time and Money

Contact center services use other automated tools, such as chatbots and IVR, to allow customer self-service. An individual can handle routine tasks, freeing up your agents to deal with more pressing issues. You can also limit the size of your workforce to essential personnel.

Enhance the Employee Experience

Contact center services put the tools your agents need at their fingertips. User-friendly software makes reaching subject-matter experts and accessing critical information more straightforward. As a result, workers have less frustration and a better employee experience.

Improve the Customer Experience

With omnichannel contact center services, your company becomes more inclusive and responsive to customers of varying physical abilities. You can use video with captioning for customers with hearing issues or text readers for those with visual impairments.

The Best Features of Contact Center Services

What specific technologies allow you to achieve the previously mentioned benefits of contact center services? Consider just a few of the best features.

Interactive Voice Response

IVR is a system that facilitates self-service and call routing by allowing callers to input a text or voice response to an automated menu. The technology then directs the caller through a menu tree to complete an action or reach the appropriate party.

Call Routing

Minimize any mistakes and speed up your customer service with intelligent routing. You can direct customers to the most helpful agents with skill-based routing. Plus, you can continue the conversation with customers who first reached out to you through chat, email, or social media without having to ask them to repeat themselves.

Call Recording

Comply with regulations and retain vital details that your legal department or human resources might need with automatic call recording. Archiving also ensures you have easy access to any conversations that occur over your communication channels.

Advanced Analytics

Artificial intelligence provides you with a quick way to understand what happened during any interaction. The software transcribes and analyzes conversations to give you a timely and accurate account, which helps you improve coaching and training.

Types of Contact Centers

You can customize your contact center services according to your business’s needs. Below are the different types of centers you can run.

Cloud vs. On-Premise

On-premise solutions require you to buy lots of equipment and install physical lines. You have ultimate control, but it comes at a much higher expense.

Cloud contact center services offer you maximum features and flexibility. The system operates over the internet, so you only need a web connection and smart devices to use it. As a result, these online contact center services are the simplest way to set up remote and hybrid work teams at the lowest cost.

Inbound vs. Outbound

Inbound teams receive incoming calls, while outbound services perform outreach, such as marketing, lead generation, and sales. With cloud contact center services, you can easily operate both types in one organization.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel

Multichannel contact centers have multiple channels of contact, but each channel is separate. Customers cannot easily move from one communication method to another without starting a new conversation with a different agent.

Omnichannel contact centers integrate your communication channels, making the customer experience seamless. Agents can serve customers in any manner and keep data on one convenient dashboard.

Are You Ready To Get the Most Out of Contact Center Services?

Intermedia can help you set up your contact center services quickly, so you can start offering the best customer experience possible. Contact us today to discover which plan is right for you!

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.