The Face of the Modern Contact Center
Most modern contact centers may have little or no physical presence. Operations are distributed to employees working from homes and in satellite offices. Calls and messages are automatically distributed according to agent availability and expertise. The agent’s location matters very little — a fact that can be an asset for organizations that want to use “follow the sun” scheduling to provide 24/7 support without paying shift premiums or forcing people to work overnight hours.Such distributed work environments present some challenges in people management, performance measurement, and call tracking that would be beyond the scope of legacy contact center technology — but cloud platforms can simplify this complexity.
For example, integration with multiple line of business (LOB) applications and cloud databases can arm agents with data about each customer’s preferences, purchase history, and previous call center interactions. This empowers agents to deliver more personalized service experiences.That single-pane-of-glass view “transforms working practices and employee use of technology,” says Kyndryl’s Hardy. “They get a more holistic view of who they’re engaging with.”
Integrating data siloes would be difficult or impossible to do with most legacy on-premises technology, Hardy continues. “You can achieve a certain degree of integration, but it’s very expensive. When a new stream like TikTok comes into the company, it’s almost impossible” to incorporate it, he notes.
A modern cloud-based contact center solution can seamlessly integrate multiple contact channels to improve employee proficiency and job satisfaction. Agents can respond to social media requests or chat sessions between calls. Interacting with customers through the channels they prefer leads to shorter resolution times, more personalized experiences, and ultimately more satisfied customers.
Caller identity lookup enables contact center software to deliver a consolidated screen of everything the company knows about a person before the agent even answers the call. This reduces the time to resolution and enhances agents’ ability to personalize interactions based on the customer’s known preferences. This also reduces the need to ask callers to repeat basic information multiple times. If a call needs to be escalated, the agent can quickly identify an available representative with the right level of expertise and send that person the customer profile information along with the transferred call.
Finally, the contact center has become an expression of an organization’s digital presence. With the growing trend ofe-commerce, the importance of having a robust and responsive online presence can’t be overemphasized. The website and the mobile app are increasingly the face that businesses present to the world. To earn the trust of the next generation of consumers, that presence needs to be welcoming, responsive, and always available. “The ability to meet customers wherever they are at any time defines your digital presence,” says Donna Chiaramonte, a director in Kyndryl’s Digital Workplace Global Practice. “Having a platform that can pivot across multiple channels is critically important.”
