Transforming the Contact Center from a reactive resolution dinosaur to business-critical growth driver

Since the inception of the Contact Center more than 60 years ago, the demands placed on it by the business have increased every year. This increase is primarily due to the sheer volume of consumer products and services paired with the rise of communication technology. In response to this relentless pressure, new features were tacked on over time, morphing the Contact Center into a clunky but immeasurably necessary business unit. And more recently, it has been acknowledged as a critical revenue center.

We’re at a pivotal point in the life cycle of the modern Contact Center for two primary reasons:

1. The demands on Contact Centers will only continue to increase as technology advances and consumer communication preferences shift. The rapid pace of growth makes it difficult to know what the business needs are for today and will be for the future.
2. Contact Center vendors may offer similar features on paper, but these features were often created agnostic of the others and lack the required interoperability. And each new technology added seems to create exponential growth in complexity.

The result of the two points above? A reactive customer service motion that is, simply put, stuck between having too many tools (not having a single reliable place to manage every interaction) and having a piecemeal data/reporting strategy that makes optimization decisions difficult.

The road to implementing a healthy Contact Center - getting started

We know that unnecessary complexity is detrimental, but doing nothing in the face of shifting consumer trends is perhaps moreso. So how do we plot a course forward that both keeps up with consumer trends and fits your business? We’ve come up with a list of considerations that will take your CCaaS operations from large, clunky dinosaur status to living, breathing, revenue-driving workflows that blend CC philosophy with technology.

1. Identify the objectives of your Contact Center
   By understanding the SMART goals of a Contact Center, your organization will be able to home in on what truly matters as it relates to processes and technologies. These objectives might include CSAT, customer retention rate, time to resolution, NPS score, repeat customer tickets, similar issues, etc.
2. Map objectives to individual and team KPIs
   Taking objective-building to the next level and ensuring that each person on your team understands how their role will impact the overall objective is essential to putting a sensible tactical framework together. These team KPIs could include average response time, abandonment rate, first contact resolution (FCR), transfer rate, etc.
3. Map your team’s KPIs to the foundational processes in the customer service motion
   With everyone aligned on the objectives and key results, it’s time to identify what needs to happen in order to bring these to life—channel inventory, required operational functionality (chatbots, virtual agents, automations, etc.), data management, agent training, new products and policies, etc. By identifying the processes that will help you achieve success, you’ll be able to line up the tools you need to succeed.
4. Map your processes and required functionality to a complementary set of tools that are simple, interoperable and efficient
   Hint: your contact center platform should serve as the centerpiece of your stack as it relates to day-to-day execution. The stack should be unified by a central platform built to make the agent experience as efficient as possible so the customers can reach you, get help, and move on. Perhaps the most important part of this is the ability to easily build workflows that unify the native features with the integrated features. A good Contact Center platform will keep it all together.

We’ll be writing and sharing more of our thoughts on the modern Contact Center in the coming weeks. Feel free to bookmark our blog for best practices and updates in the customer service space.

You can also take a self-guided demo of our Contact Center platform, or request a custom demo from our team here.