The Contact Center Explosion – 6 Benefits of Contact Center Tools for All Business Sizes
You no longer have to be a Very Large Business to benefit from the toolkit of the Modern Contact Center.
There are many names for the place where a business centralizes their customer communications and support. Whatever they’re called, they almost all still invoke the image of a cubical farm filled with people wearing headsets, all talking at once on behalf of Very Large Business (VLB).
The modern concept of a contact center however, has exploded. In 2024, “contact center” isn’t that sea of phone operators. Contact Centers can now be considered along a wide spectrum.
Whether you’re that VLB or Jane of Janeway Corp and you are employee number one of one, the functionality today’s contact center solutions provide is a scalable hub of tools that can elevate your customer experience and communications, empower your staff to work from anywhere, streamline your processes, and provide valuable analytics.
There are different levels of the contact center toolset along this spectrum that depend on the size and needs of your team. It could be that you just need a basic ring group that calls five people whenever a call comes in on your main number. Maybe you need a chat queue to answer live inquiries from your website. Possibly, your IT support team needs a better way to handle inbound support requests. Or you might have a large customer service organization that is already using multiple tools but they don’t talk to each other very well or at all.
Reframing “Contact Center”
Throw out that image of the cube farm in Very Large Business land and let’s reframe the concept. You may not even realize you have a contact center! Do you have a customer support team? Who is fielding social media inquiries and customer e-mails? While that sea of phones scenario is also still true, it’s not the full picture anymore.
Consider this- you’re a local auto parts chain fielding social media inquiries, phone calls, and emails all through different systems but you’d also like to start using SMS to confirm orders and recently a customer asked about being able to chat through your website. The thought of having several different solutions for all these incoming customer needs is daunting, expensive, and not flexible or scalable.
It’s the integration of all these separate pieces that defines a modern day contact center. A contact center (or Customer Experience (CX) Platform) allows you to manage telephone calls, respond to social media inquiries, handle email, and confirm orders through SMS – even manage a website chat with live humans and/or self-service AI tools – all from a single platform.
The Benefits of the Modern Contact Center
1. Enable customers to contact you in their preferred method.
Customers aren’t just contacting businesses via the phone anymore. 93% of customers use emails to engage with companies (salesforce) and 1 in 5 Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X say social media DMs are their preferred channel to get customer service from a company (HubSpot). Customers want you to be where they are; they want help wherever or whenever they need assistance. Contact center solutions can help you achieve this in a streamlined way.
2. All customer communication in one place
A contact center solution brings together all your communications. Phone calls, video meetings, text messaging (1-on-1 or broadcast), emails, CRM, tickets, and more can all be managed and handled through one platform.
Identify and fix systemic problems faster with a single source of data. Implement channel switching to allow text conversations to escalate to a phone call and phone calls to video. Reduce administrative overhead with a single admin portal for making changes. This is the power of the modern contact center.
3. Empower your employees to work from wherever
The explosion of this area isn’t just the dynamic tools now available at various levels but also how the environment itself has changed. Most everyone moved their team home during the pandemic and many of us have kept them there. Did you work out a real plan once you were no longer in panic mode? Do your tools properly support a widespread workforce?
You can eliminate real-estate costs, become more attractive in the hiring marketplace, and make your organization more disaster-proof with a proper remote working plan.
4. Enable your managers to oversee what’s happening
Contact Center solutions offer Supervisor tools that regular communication products do not. Empower your management with tools to oversee all interactions in real-time. Provide supervisors with real-time dashboards customizable to your needs. Allow agents to request help and supervisors the tools to respond by monitoring or joining interactions. Give them the alerts to warn of problems and the tools to respond. Empowered employees are happier and more productive. Happier employees means happier customers. (HBR)
5. Contact Center tools are scalable
No matter your size now, there are contact center tools that can fit your needs. You don’t have to be huge to implement best practices and leverage powerful tools to improve your customer experience. These same tools can grow as you grow. Begin as you mean to go on. Implement tools that will elevate your customer experience and streamline your processes.
6. Data, Data, Data
Using a contact center solution has the added benefit of analytics. Understand the complete customer experience across multiple interaction channels. Compare the success rate of different channels in achieving First Contact Resolution. Manage staffing to optimize your resources. Just having your email in your email inbox and your phones taking phone calls limits your ability to learn what your customers (and staff/agents) are doing and how. Operating without good data means you’re operating blind.
Conclusion
The term “contact center” should not be seen as daunting but rather as an opportunity for businesses of all sizes to improve their customer engagement. Owners of any size business can rethink their communication strategies and consider the benefits of implementing a centralized hub. In today’s world, regardless of what you call it, a contact center is not just the realm of VLB’s but rather also a valuable tool for any business looking to thrive. Customer Experience and the concept of a “contact center” has changed over the years and months and continues to evolve even as I type this. If you’re unsure of where you fall on the spectrum, Vertical Experts are here to help identify the right toolset for your company’s goals.
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