As businesses increasingly go online, customer care would play a bigger role in determining their fate in the market. This is because, for online customers, the only real point of contact is the call center and so the onus of making the right first impression squarely rests with the call center. However, the inconsistent level of service excellence offered by call centers has for long been a pain point for businesses. Today, this problem stands augmented, as customers seek more value added services from call centers which, in the first place, are not equipped to meet this need. In this blog we will talk about what call centers need to do to meet new levels of expectations.
Call centers are still struggling with problems that have plagued them since inception. The need for software updates, different call routing, outage response mechanism and seamless scaling of operations have been lasting problems to which there have been no solutions. Consequently, call centers have been found wanting in analyzing customer insights, and making necessary changes to customer service capabilities on the fly. So delivering a consistently high customer experience has remained a distant dream. With expectations of consistent service levels rising, the time has come for call centers to leverage the power of cloud computing technology to meet the aspirations of the digital age.
Here’s an inspiring tale of how Cloud computing saved the day for CarSafe, a company which sells and services extended warranties for car owners. The company had entrusted its call center operations to a vendor in St. Louis. One day, the DS 3 line to the call center snapped, leaving the sales team with no way to receive calls. The sales reps quickly went to a separate CarSafe call center, logged in and got back to work. The reason they could do this is because CarSafe uses a cloud-based contact center platform which obviates the need for modification to operate from a faraway location.
Though cloud computing presents several advantages, its potential to improve customer experience should be of particular interest to contact centers. As is in the above case, cloud can help to combine office phones with home phones and mobile phones into one network, enabling calls from customers to be routed to the next available representative irrespective of the location. This can lead to increased automation, improved workflow scripting and enhanced compliance management all of which can combine to reduce errors and improve customer satisfaction.
At a time when ecommerce is burgeoning rapidly, call centers need to embrace popular modes of communications such as email, chat, and text, besides improving on traditional voice service. Cloud computing can help contact centers effectively capture this fragmented mode of communication and refocus it into transparent and manageable modes for the workforce. This would help to break the usual siloed approach to solving customer problems and in the process lift customer experience to newer heights.
If delighting customers through service excellence is the core objective of call centers, cloud computing can help them achieve this with ease. And most importantly, it would help contact centers become a seamless extension of the business they represent.
