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“By 2020, 60% of large organizations will try to design a customer engagement hub, yet only half of them will select the correct technologies to make it work.”
For contact centers, effective problem solving is one of the most important skills an agent needs to possess. Unfortunately, problem solving isn’t always intuitive. In many cases, it needs to be learned through careful training and systemization.
Contact centers are important organizations. In addition to offering customer service, resolving customer concerns, and making sales, contact centers are often one of the first points of contact a customer has with a company. Because of this, it’s incredibly important that every agent employed within a contact center possesses the following traits:
Upwards of 65% of businesses are currently using cloud-based platforms and, according to a study conducted in 2014, more than 21.1% of contact centers are planning to move their business to cloud-based platforms within the next 13-18 months.
For contact centers, average handle time (AHT) is one of the most important measurable metrics.
When consumers think of contact centers, they often conjure images of large, faceless companies with agent-operated phone systems. They don’t, however, often think of small brick-and-mortar or e-commerce companies. The reason for this is that contact centers are still relatively rare among small businesses, even though they have the potential to help small businesses increase their bottom lines and produce more profits.
Compared to other businesses, contact centers face a unique set of challenges. The high-volume and often stressful environment can be difficult for employees, managers, and engineers alike and it’s easy for contact centers to fall victim to a predictable set of common problems.
In a contact center, there is nothing more important than customer service. It is both the center of the business and the foundation from which conversions and sales spring. Without good customer service, companies don’t earn positive word-of-mouth recommendations and may even lose customers. In fact, of the customers who leave a company, 68% do so because of poor customer service. With this in mind, it is clear that providing outstanding customer service is the best way for contact centers to maintain a strong customer base and to ensure that business stays on track.
One of the main challenges that contact centers face is disconnected systems. These systems are numerous and agents are required to wade through them in order to locate information, provide service, offer support, or make sales.
Contact Centers count on their agents to offer excellent customer service. To assure this is achieved at all levels, contact centers rely on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as queue time, average handle time, first call resolution, abandonment rate, etc.
3 Ways to Reduce Training Time Using Technology If you really want to reduce training time, we challenge you to look at the technology your agents are using. Is it simple to use? Does it proactively help agents? Does it make their jobs easier? If you didn't answer YES to all of those questions, you could be complicating your training efforts out of the gate due to the technology your agents utilize to manage the customer journey. One of the unsung heroes of SpiceCSM's Business Process/BPM tool is the ability to reduce the amount of time agents need to start producing at the levels of longstanding employees. Typically when bringing new agents onto the team there's a period of training, usually involving some classroom knowledge transfer, exercises, role playing, and a variety of other methods to give the agents resources to solve requests efficiently. Depending on the organization and type of business, this could take anywhere from 1 - 12 weeks, or longer. In higher turnover environments this only exacerbates training challenges and emphasizes the need to make new employees more productive in less time. Here are 3 ways you can utilize technology to help reduce training efforts:
What is iPaaS: Explaining Integration Capabilities What is iPaaS? iPaas is a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to connect their existing systems together. It provides a single interface where users can access their data from across different software platforms. This means they can view information from one application within another without having to switch between them. The platform also makes it easy for people to build new integrations by providing low-code tools that allow connections to be made with external systems.
LCAP - What is a Low-Code Application Platform The vision that SpiceCSM has from our inception was to have an application that provided the tools to customize the user experience easily and orchestrate data without the need for technical expertise. What we've been calling an "Enterprise Application Builder" is now being recognized by leading analysts as a Low-Code Application platform, or LCAP for short.
The best and most complete platform for data integration, case management, and workflow management to help transform your customer journey.