Would a contact center solution work for your business? Here are the top five ways your organization could benefit.

1. Integration with CRM software – Track your successes and failures and analyze the data to determine the best time to pick up the phone. Add new customers to your database with every call.
2. More respect for your customers’ time – No one likes waiting on the phone. And having to explain the same problem twice or connecting with an agent who can’t help is even more frustrating. Contact Center Solutions properly direct the call and pass on the information to the next agent.
3. Integration with social media – Today’s customers/callers Tweet, Like, and Chat more than making calls. Today’s Contact Center Solutions can monitor and filter social media and detect who needs special attention. You can direct your customers on any social media platform right to your agents.
4. It’s all about experience – Contact Center Solutions let a supervisor monitor a call and gives the option of either “whispering” into an agent’s ear without the customer hearing, or “barge” into the call and take over. Either way, the customer will get the benefit of the more experienced agent and have a better call experience.
5. Customizable distribution rules – The order that calls are directed can be completely customizable based on tracking and analyzing data on success rate, length of calls, skill sets, and more. You can also make sure customers get the same agent every time.

You have heard all the buzz words – IVR, ACD, CRM – and more. But how do you know what to look for in a hosted contact center solution? We understand the alphabet soup can be overwhelming. Let us help make sense of narrowing down the process. Here are the top five things to look for:

1. Service Reliability & Uptime – No other metric is as important as reliability. If your contact center is down for even a minute, you’re losing lots of money every minute. Your contact center service provider of choice should have at least 99.99 percent reliability. Unlike on-premise solutions, contact center solutions are geographically redundant to improve dependability.
2. Ease of Use, Admin Portal Access, Dashboard Simplicity – The best features in the world are useless if the agent ends up writing everything down on a piece of scrap paper. Make sure the complex features of your potential contact center software are still easy enough to learn and use.
3. Provides a 360 Degree View of Your Customer – Your contact center solutions need to pull information about a customer from several sources and put that information in front of the agent, so the agent can better serve the customer. Knowing the customer’s past actions and present concerns will help predict their future needs.
4. Customer Self Service Features and Automated Tasks – Let your agent do the important stuff, but the boring tasks can be done for you. A good contact center Solution will make the most of your agent’s time.
5. Security Measures – In today’s age of identity theft and leaked emails, you need the proper amount of encryption to keep your data safe. In addition, all financial and medical communications/data are tightly regulated. Be sure that your customers will feel safe giving private information to your agents.

Want more help with the alphabet soup? For more information on how contact center can increase productivity and deliver better customer service in your organization, reach out today.