Does your business NEED a Contact Center?

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.