{"id":150101,"date":"2017-01-13T08:11:23","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T06:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=150101"},"modified":"2017-01-13T08:11:23","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T06:11:23","slug":"the-top-5-essential-solutions-you-need-for-your-contact-centre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/industry-news\/150101\/the-top-5-essential-solutions-you-need-for-your-contact-centre\/","title":{"rendered":"The top 5 essential solutions you need for your Contact Centre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tracker.mybroadband.co.za\/\/track.php?page=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5vZGVrLmNvLnphLw?source=Article 3 of 6\">ODEK<\/a> was recently invited to present to a varied industry audience on what we see as the main essentials of the modern-day Contact Centre.<\/p>\n<p>Each of these is probably a lengthy white paper on its own, however we hope to wet your thought appetites enough to assist you in beginning a journey of transition towards these soon.<\/p>\n<p>We considered the following key factors in making our presentation:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Affordability and cost effectiveness;<\/li>\n<li>Sustainability of the solution;<\/li>\n<li>A combination of existing and new solutions;<\/li>\n<li>Customer behaviour changes when interacting;<\/li>\n<li>Ease of implementation;<\/li>\n<li>Success rates that we have observed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Our top 5 contact centre essential solutions are:<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>1. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>IVR may seem like \u201cold school\u201d or \u201coutdated\u201d solution talk that many believe is not the future of communication.<\/p>\n<p>However, let\u2019s consider this for just a moment\u2026<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Customers treat this channel as the main (in some cases-\u00a0 the only) gateway to your company.<\/li>\n<li>Customers have accepted this as a norm for query resolution, sales, service and product queries.<\/li>\n<li>The IVR remains the single biggest interaction channel through it human elements, even with the newer more technologically advanced channels available.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The traditional IVR has spawned into a far more intelligent one offering powerful solution that can drive self-service, intelligent routing strategies, and significantly reducing handle times in your contact centre.<\/p>\n<p>The possibilities of the latest intelligent IVR solutions available are truly endless in driving down cost and improving customer experience.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>2. Back Office Optimisation<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>What we all are striving for is to <em>\u201ckeep our customer promises\u201d<\/em> and the back office is an essential focal point of many of our customers as they recognise the impact of an unresolved or escalated queries on their customer\u2019s experience metrics.<\/p>\n<p>The challenge many companies are facing, is having effective back office automation system that manages work item outputs hourly with built in real time and historical reporting at queue and agent level.<\/p>\n<p>The focus in addressing these must be that your back office is intrinsically aligned to your contact centre frontline, business objectives and strategic initiatives, with specific measured outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>These measures can include the total volume of back office work items logged, service level targets, response time targets, escalation volume and resolution targets at departmental level.<\/p>\n<p>If we consider this together with the latest trends in Digital and Social Media channels, it is becoming ever more imperative to automate specific tasks that can either require the assistance of human intervention or via an automated accurate response.<\/p>\n<p>These systems do exist and are making a huge impact in customer journey management.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>3. Interaction Analytics<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Contact Centres have historically relied on a QA team to assess the compliance rates, accuracy of information, tone and customer sentiment for sales and service related voice interactions.<\/p>\n<p>This generally equated to between 1% and 3% of the total call volume handled.<\/p>\n<p>The frustration is often that the volume of QA\u2019s conducted is not enough to make strategic decisions and is in fact a very expensive exercise.<\/p>\n<p>With technology advances made in the Speech and Text analytics arenas these should be problems of the past.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine the possibilities if you could increase the number of interactions assessed to above 40% to 60% daily as well as having trend reports, agent compliance reports, agent behaviour trends in your organisation and a complete set of actionable insights into your customers\u2019 needs and wants.<\/p>\n<p>Interaction Analytics needs to be a serious consideration and is quite possibility the most exciting suite of solution in the contact centre industry in the last 10 years.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>4. Social and Digital engagement<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Social engagement whilst amazing and wonderful in bringing people together, also brings with it a new set of challenges.<\/p>\n<p>Customers can say what they want, when they want and how they want\u2026 and to any audience that is \u201clistening\u201d about your brand or company.<\/p>\n<p>How we respond to these interactions has never been more important.<\/p>\n<p>The old contact centre rule books have been changed in what seemed like overnight and there was nothing we could do about it.<\/p>\n<p>Some companies are still grappling with \u201con what to do next\u201d while customers are taking the initiative to change and force the changes if they must.<\/p>\n<p>This should be an essential new step for some and more focussed approach for those who have already started the journey of monitoring, measuring, counting and responding to socially engaged customers.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>5. Omni Channel Engagement<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>With due consideration for the previous four contact centre essential described above, it should be no surprise that our fifth contact centre essential is bringing all these interaction channels together.<\/p>\n<p>It should not be taken lightly that your customers have new choices to interact with your contact centre.<\/p>\n<p>Customers are no longer preferring or using just one channel at the same time (example- WEB and Inbound Voice), but rather are engaged on more than one at any given time.<\/p>\n<p>Omni Channel Engagement speaks to exactly that customer behaviour so that context, experience and information can be provided to the agent dealing with the interaction.<\/p>\n<p>The customer doesn\u2019t see interactions as separate events any longer and rather views all touch points as a singular interaction and therefore companies must be investing time, energy and money in technology that can over a sustained period of grow to meet the needs of our customers.<\/p>\n<p>For more information on Contact Centres, visit the <a href=\"http:\/\/tracker.mybroadband.co.za\/\/track.php?page=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5vZGVrLmNvLnphLw?source=Article 3 of 6\">ODEK website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ODEK looks at essential modern-day contact centre solutions to drive down cost and improve the customer experience.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":150221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10459],"tags":[26,11613],"class_list":["post-150101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news","tag-headline","tag-odek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150101"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150223,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150101\/revisions\/150223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}