Three Ways to Optimize Technology in Your Contact Center

Developing and operating a profitable contact center is not an easy task. On one hand, managers need to consider the business side of the company by monitoring and evaluating agent performance, tracking month-over-month revenue, and forecasting cost. On the flip side, if contact centers wish to compete in today’s consumer-driven market, it is imperative they pay close attention to customer experience and feedback and adjust their processes and procedures accordingly. To succeed at both sides of the business, optimization is key. In this vein, contact centers need to implement an organized and centralized framework that supports both business objectives.

Here are three recommendations for building a profitable and effective framework to structure contact center performance, identify barriers and growth opportunities, and seamlessly interact and engage with customers.

1. Focus on Infrastructure First

In order to communicate effectively and seamlessly with consumers, contact centers need to ensure their internal workflow is organized and transparent. When evaluating a contact center’s infrastructure for efficiency, supervisors should look at agent engagement, agent training, customer experience, and call reporting. By leveraging new technologies such as workforce management and workforce optimization, contact centers will have access to capabilities such as data collection, call recording, keyword monitoring, speech transcription with sentiment analysis, and agent coaching, all available at their fingertips. With modern workforce optimization solutions, contact center supervisors can better monitor and track customer calls and agent engagement, identify sales and collection opportunities, and have access to resources to improve the employee training process. The ability to track and improve agent behavior, understand customer preferences, and root out inefficiencies in office operations is the first step of many to building a sustainable contact center.

2. Centralize and Analyze Existing Data

Garnering in-depth insight into your contact center data is critical for improving productivity, streamlining operations and driving revenue. However, the process of compiling, centralizing and analyzing data to make informed decisions can often be overwhelming and time-consuming for contact center managers. Implementing automated intelligence can assist contact center mangers in deriving informative results from internal data to better forecast costs, track time and resources as well as identify sales leads to manage external opportunities.

Leveraging technology such as business intelligence (BI) enables contact centers to visualize data through charts and graphs, as well as measure, compare, prescribe and predict contact center performance over time. Integrating BI into a contact center’s operations equips managers with the tools necessary to monitor and score agents, forecast seasonal staffing needs and track customer behavior. Overall, BI enables contact centers to make data-driven decisions to take back control of their business.

3. Endorse Customer Engagement

Once internal and external operations are established and running smoothly, contact centers can work on the final piece of the equation - optimizing customer engagement. To successfully engage with a customer, contact centers need to understand customer behavior. With the majority of businesses blasting consumers with stock marketing campaigns, authentic outreach and engagement is a differentiating factor for today’s digital consumer. Leveraging machine learning (ML) technology to uncover unstructured customer preferences and insights can make all the difference between spamming customers and building a relationship with customized messaging that resonates with consumers. With ML technology, businesses can capture unique feedback in real-time and customize their outreach to establish meaningful connections with customers, resulting in increased sales and brand loyalty.

In conclusion, optimizing contact centers begins from the inside out. Take time to research, vet and invest in the right technology to automate, streamline and support your organizations’ needs. Establishing the right framework, deploying personalized, effective outreach and monitoring the results will prove fruitful in the long run.