Wise contact center leaders know the importance of customer engagement, which generates vital goodwill and drives sales. As such, it’s essential that agents have access to all the tools they need to perform at the highest levels when dealing with customers. Companies invest in knowledge management, helpdesk solutions, call routing and other technology to streamline processes and enhance the customer encounter.

A caller’s experience with a company’s contact center can either make, or break, the customer relationship. Call center leaders appreciate the role a happy customer plays in building goodwill and eventually convert call into new business. To create an atmosphere of satisfaction and engagement, quick responses to questions and effective assistance with customer concerns are top priorities. Therefore, agents must perform promptly and efficiently.

A company would not stand without its customers, a fact well known among contact center leaders who strive to create the best possible experience for those who call in with questions or problems. A supportive and rewarding agent encounter can lead to new sales and valuable goodwill; a poor agent encounter can lead a customer straight to the competitors. The person making the difference between the two encounters is the call center agent. Therefore, thorough training is absolutely essential, both on “soft skills” and on the multiple applications required for a typical customer experience.

Considering the importance of customer engagement and valuable goodwill, contact centers appreciate the importance of robust tools that assist agents in performing their tasks. Customer relations management and various helpdesk software solutions enable personnel to provide high quality service, but maintaining multiple applications creates a new set of challenges. Disparate systems result in severe disconnect between and among the applications which results in inaccurate vital customer data.

The call center is rife with possibilities for increasing efficiency, boosting productivity and decreasing costs – all while maintaining high levels of customer engagement. The key to taking advantage of these opportunities lies in automating certain processes that are manually performed by agents. Still, numerous challenges occur due to the array of unique systems in place in a typical call center. In most cases, the applications and data aren’t effectively linked and integrated to facilitate process automation or streamline workflows.

The job of a contact center manager isn’t easy and it requires balancing of many competing business initiatives. First and foremost, customer engagement is a high priority. A pleasant encounter with a company’s call center goes a long way to establishing goodwill, so an agent must provide a vibrant, rewarding experience. Solving problems quickly and responding to questions with valuable information can also result in repeat business from satisfied customers. Still, productivity is of utmost importance for both experienced and newly trained agents.

A company’s call center is vital to its customer support operations, so it’s critical to give agents the tools they need to provide premium, responsive service. As such, businesses invest in solutions like helpdesk software, call center scripting and customer experience management to enhance the encounter. However, technology has created certain problems even as it’s solving others. Disparate platforms make the agent’s job more difficult as they must access and navigate multiple tools to resolve customer issues.

Proper customer experience management is one of the highest goals of a contact center, as the relationship with its customers is inherently valuable to a company. Achieving this objective requires call center leaders and agents to provide an engaging, helpful experience, whether by answering questions or solving customer problems. A rewarding encounter results in business goodwill and can generate new sales. Of course, companies must also be keep tabs on costs and productivity in the contact center. Managers must ensure agents perform satisfactorily and that new employees have proper training. Technology, such as helpdesk software and call center scripts, is there to assist agents with the various tasks they must perform during a call. However, new problems arise with the disparate tools and applications: Many contact centers use up to 15 different solutions, each of which must be updated to reflect new data.

Most Call centers spend a lot of money and resources to keep their best agent interested; however turn over is high, usually above 33%. The SpiceCSM Customer Engagement Platform is equipped with all of the sought after features you’ll need to greatly improve your agents and customer satisfaction. We aren’t your ordinary Call Center CRM and ticket tool. We are a unified cloud based platform and one of our special ingredient that makes us unique and valuable is the Guided Process Workflows. By using a Guided Process Workflow, each separate variable is taken into account and the agent is guided to the right solution. With this approach, you can hire agents less tech-savvy but agents with more soft skills. The Guided Process workflows make it easier for your agents to solve complex technical issues with relaxed and personalized manner.

In the last 10 years, the customer service industry, across all verticals, has seen a drastic increase in the use of remote agents. This rise in popularity stems from many reasons, the main ones being lower costs, improved agent satisfaction, scalability, and advancements in technology. Each one of these factors has had a great influence on the way companies provide support to it's customer base. Now that the remote agent has become so commonplace, customer service groups are looking for ways to reduce costs of at home agents, especially the start-up costs associated with deploying service agents across the US and the world.