You are at the
inflection point in your business,where your product or service offering is a
hit with customers and now there is a regular funnel of customers signing up
for it. Things are great.
Moving ahead as
your customer base increases, your support requests increase too. So far, you
have published your personal number, but as you scale, that’s not enough. Good
customer support is what will retain your customer, and we all know cost of
customer acquisition is much higher than customer retention & ‘happy customers
will also become your brand ambassadors’
One of the most
common questions we come across the company’s is
Is
it time to start a dedicated contact center?
Different flavours
of the same question are –
How do we qualify
the business needs and decide whether a dedicated setup has to be created for
your Customer Support? Or
When is an
integrated business and operational support system needed for your business?
To make it easier
for you to answer this very important question, we have created a checklist
below. Please spend some time thinking about these questions and fill up the
checklist. This will give you an idea about your need to set up a contact centre.
To understand
whether your business needs a contact centre, Please check on the following:
Customer
Experience when they call your business:
1. Have your customers started complaining that they are not
able to get through the number published for support (Its busy most of the time
or no one picks up)?
2. Do your customers have to try your number multiple times
to get connected to support team?
3. Are your customers asking to talk to the same person who
spoke with them last time?
4. Does your customer have to wait while PBX keeps ringing
different phones and finally connects to the reception who again transfers to a
phone that never picks up?
5. Does your Customer have no confidence that there would never
be a proper response when he calls up. He feels lucky if he is connected to
right person?
6. Have you decided to hire dedicated staff just to take customer
calls.
Your
expectation from the system handling customer calls:
1. Do you expect all your customers to be greeted and let
them know that they reached the right number, when they call you?
2. Do you want your customer to have predictable experience every
time, with high level of confidence that whenever they call, they would receive
proper treatment.
3. Do you want your customer to be greeted with their name
when an agent answers the call?
4. Do you want to have faster ROI, with better Agent efficiency
& Productivity?
5. Would you like to help your agent to handle more calls without
being stressed out?
6. Do you want to know if the support team is performing as
per your expectation and is not over or under staffed?
7. As management, is there a sales conversion from these
calls – do you want to track it?
8. Do you need audio recordings for quality check, future
reference, for support ticket closures?
If the answers to
50% or more of these questions is Yes , then definitely you
need to setup a contact center.
Contact
Center system:
In simple word
contact center system is a set of multiple systems that work together to
provide predictable customer experience. Where customer knows what to expect
next and how he will be able to get the right response for his query.
Technically,Contact Center system monitors the resources such as agent, phone lines etc.
and distributes the calls efficiently and to the right agents. It provides real-time
feedback to the caller to keep in updated of his call status (such as queue
location or expected wait time). Allows caller to make a choice e.g. Press 1
for Sales, Press 2 for Support etc.
For customer
perspective he is in control and drives the conversation, this could be by
choosing the right IVR option, knowing the wait time in queue and selecting
the option to call back dropping out of the queue and much more.
From agent
perspective it makes sure that all agents are loaded equally by making
intelligent distribution of the call. It provides tools and controls that help agents to respond to the calls efficiently such as customer information screen pop,
control bar that let agent control the call using keyboard instead of shuffling
between the keyboard and phone keypad and many such features.
For management
they get the absolute control over the process and performance. They can design
the business rules based on various parameters (such as platinum, gold or
silver customer) and make sure that customer gets the treatment they deserve.
Monitor that the service level and quality goals are met. Take informed
decision on, if the current contact center setup( in terms of infrastructure
and manpower) is enough or redundant for his current requirement.
Contact Center
System –High Level
Perspective
Once you have right
setup in place, you have built a strong base to transform your Support center into an industry standard Customer Contact Center.
Phases of
Transitioning to a Customer Centric Organization
Now that you know
when to go for a Contact Center Solution, do ensure that the same system can
Scale with flexibility for meeting your ultimate objective of a Customer
Centric Organization.
But when does
your contact center system transforms into a Customer Experience Management
System? What is the difference?
Next week, we
will look at how we can upgrade our contact center solution to a Customer
Experience Management System.
About us - Cloud Agent:
Our product – http://cloudagent.in is
India’s first of its kind Contact Center solution on the cloud. We have taken
care of all the above parameters discussed, to ensure that our customers can
grow on the same system from a small Contact center to a full blown customer
experience management system. To know more, email us at sales@cloudagent.in or contact us on
our toll free 1800 200 0820.
