Unified Communication: The Future Foundations for Customer Service

Contact center operations are rapidly moving into the cloud as a growing number of businesses embrace the flexibility and simplicity of subscription-based services. For channel partners, this presents a big opportunity to talk up unified communications as a way to facilitate seamless agent communication and streamlined cross-department collaboration to better serve customers.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the cloud contact center market is growing at almost twice the rate of premises-based contact center systems (11.6 percent versus 6.1 percent). Moving a contact center to the cloud has a number of benefits in terms of flexibility. It allows customer service agents and supervisors to be in any location, and allows companies to scale up to manage peak or seasonal demands—a huge benefit in the retail and entertainment sector. Additionally, cloud-based contact centers support business continuity and remote agent strategies.
However, taking full advantage of that flexibility requires an underlying collaborative approach that makes communication seamless between agents and departments, with a centralized way to link distributed agents and resources. Functions such as seamless call transfer, the option to escalate chats to calls, mobile support, and more become crucial.
Adopting UC in a contact center environment can directly address some top pain points for customers. A January 2015 customer experience survey examined consumer perceptions of service while making online or phone purchases over $25 in the previous six months. The study, from Harris Interactive, found that consumers most want agent service continuity and choice of channels for follow-up communications.
The study found that the stakes are high. It revealed that 86 percent would be very likely to switch to another company in the future after a bad customer service experience.
Star2Star can enable the contact center with a UC platform that supports voice, video, presence, chat, and analytics between agents and across departments and geographies—thereby enabling organizations to gain a differentiating level of customer service.
StarCenter is a complete inbound call center only available from Star2Star that keeps users on the cutting edge. StarCenter makes it easy to add and administer queues and agents with an easy-to-use web-based interface. Star2Star delivers customizable features such as call routing, management and reporting.
StarCenter includes StarView, which gives call center managers the power to turn raw call center data into usable information that helps propel a business forward.
Make the Switch to Star2Star Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Does Your VoIP Contact Center Have Future-Proof Technology?

If you want your contact center to remain competitive for years to come, you’ll need to incorporate best-in-class technologies to improve agent performance and maintain quality. Without implementing leading-edge contact center solution features (that both your agents and supervisors can leverage), you may find yourself lagging behind your rivals:

For agents:

Real-time displays: Agents can meet customer needs more effectively when they have access to a wealth of customer data (i.e. company name and corporate position) in a real-time desktop display. With this capability, agents receive caller information immediately, as well as snapshots of critical metrics to monitor their own performance.

Flexible queuing configuration: This feature enhances the agent-caller interaction by ensuring customers are directed to the appropriate agent in the most informed and direct manner possible. Once those queues are created, they can be easily modified and updated to ensure that agent performance continues to be high. Multiple choices enable callers to select one of several possible actions while waiting for an agent, such as going to voicemail. Different announcement types (e.g., estimated wait time) keep callers informed of their status.

Advanced ring strategies: Incoming calls can be routed to the most appropriate agent based on several ring strategies. Rings can range from easy circular and non-prioritized round robin call distribution to skills-based routing, which targets specific agents, typically leaving agents with low skill levels for last. Another commonly deployed ring strategy is one in which calls are routed to agents based on their skill ranking. If a designated agent is busy, the system will hold the caller in the queue for a specified time period before sending the call to the next-highest-skilled agent.

For supervisors:

Agent Barge, Monitor, and Whisper: These administrative features allow supervisors to monitor, coach, and train agents. Monitor allows superiors to silently listen to calls. Whisper allows superiors to relay pertinent information to the agent handling the call without the caller knowing. Barge allows superiors to enter the call and take over the interaction.

In-depth reporting: With robust call center solutions, supervisors can access detailed call reports that include queue and agent summaries, immediately upon call completion. They can leverage historical summary reports that simplify collected data into daily, weekly, or monthly trends, as well as drill down to the underlying queue, agent, and call detail. These reports allow supervisors to provide timely feedback and support, boost service quality, and cultivate customer loyalty.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) dashboard: With this feature, managers gain real-time visibility into the most important contact center metrics such as calls answered, calls abandoned, and average and longest wait times, generating quick insights into these key metrics. Furthermore, supervisors can be alerted when a contact center event exceeds pre-set limits, allowing for rapid resolution.

To stay competitive with today’s most-customer-oriented brands, consider deploying these technologies into your contact center. Customer satisfaction impacts your bottom line because it costs far less to retain an existing client than it does to attract a new client. According to an article in CMO, to improve sales and ROI, business leaders should focus on customers already in hand.

In tandem with our Star2Star communications platform, our StarCenter full-featured contact center offers advanced functionality in an easy-to-manage system. Moreover, StarView for StarCenter gives call center managers access to real-time and historical data reports on call center metrics. Click here for more information on how AccuVoIP Services and Star2Star can enhance your business’s communications system.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.