Up, up and away: eight become one in the cloud!

The move to cloud is happening but what makes a contact centre stand out from the crowd? Colin Hay at Puzzel outlines how there are eight technologies available in the cloud to boost agent productivity and customer satisfaction in one go.

According to the latest findings from ContactBabel, respondents expect to see “significant amounts of their functionality being delivered in the cloud by mid-2019” and that “cloud-based deployment of CRM, workforce management, speech analytics and outbound dialling will at least double within two years”.(i) This reflects Puzzel’s own experience as eager customers seek to maximise the flexibility and scalability of new cloud-based infrastructures.

In addition TechTarget contributor Scott Sachs outlines eight top must-have call centre systems for customer service(ii). Take a moment to consider combining the two top technologies delivered in the cloud and even more importantly integrated in the cloud, to provide a seamless experience for agents and customers alike.

Top 8 ‘must-haves’ for agent productivity and customer satisfaction

Here we consider technology to boost cost-effectiveness and operational efficiencies along with agent and customer happiness. In purely alphabetical order, look out for the following:

1.CRM – today’s cloud-based solutions link seamlessly with some of the world’s most popular customer relationship management (CRM) applications to give agents a complete and instantaneous view of essential caller information, without switching between multiple screens, to deliver a highly personalised response.

2.Intelligent call routing – a massive step up from traditional premise-based Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems, today’s technology has sophisticated intelligence built in to route customer calls automatically from a variety of channels to the best-skilled, available agents quickly and efficiently.

3.Interactive Voice Response (IVR) – routes inbound calls to the relevant agent or department and enables self-service by automating simple transactions such as bank balance look-ups, submitting utility meter readings, ordering popular products or listening to public transport timetables. It offers customers a 24-hour service without the extra staffing or operational costs.

4.Outbound dialling - the perfect support for marketing, this facility enables agents to make outbound campaigns to a given list of contacts in a flash. Why not schedule the system to provide outbound services during off-peak hours without the need for manual intervention?

5.Post contact surveys - gather meaningful customer feedback by developing simple, short, multiple choice-style surveys targeted at different customer groups and in real time. Tap into the huge global mobile market by exploiting SMS technology. The latest survey functionality works by automatically sending the caller a survey text message just after a completed call with one of your contact centre agents. The caller can then respond with a rating and/or with additional comments. Just be sure to act on feedback – good and bad – to further improve and exceed customer expectations.

6.Quality management and call recording – develop insightful, focused quality programmes that incorporate the “voice of the customer” to drive deeper customer engagement and support better decisions on products, services and processes. Supplement this with call recording to build up an easy-to-access audio catalogue of all enquiries. By efficiently retrieving, managing, listening and sharing all or selected voice and chat conversations, contact centre supervisors can resolve complaints quickly and make meaningful operational adjustments for enhanced customer service.

7.Voice Analytics – the logical extension to call recording is today’s voice analytics technology which retains and mines the entire content of calls that were previously defined only by keywords and phrases. Modern voice analytics can recognise accents, dialects and slang and can even accommodate specialist words such as technical or industry terminology. Analyse and categorise calls based on how customers express themselves and then use this information to correct processes, address service issues and gain distinct competitive advantage.

8.Workforce Management - finally, don’t forget your agents, they are essential to delivering first-class customer service. Take strategic control of an increasingly dispersed, virtual workforce by integrating the latest cloud-based WFM technology into your contact centre. At a glance, view agent skills, availability and preferences to ensure the right agents are deployed to the right enquiries at the right time.

Be ready for seasonal peak periods and upcoming marketing campaigns by accurately predicting staffing levels and associated staff costs. This boosts agent effectiveness and retention while accelerating first contact resolution for customers.

Bring together these top eight technologies into one integrated cloud-based platform to create your best-performing contact centre - ever. What better way to realise the full benefits of the cloud?

Colin Hay is VP Sales UK at Puzzel

-ends-

About Puzzel

Puzzel builds on 20 years’ heritage. It was one of the first pioneers to develop a cloud-based contact centre. Puzzel also encompasses leading mobile messaging and mobile payments to deliver a flexible and customisable customer interaction platform to meet the needs of today’s omni-channel and mobile environments. Puzzel can be adapted to accommodate from one to several thousand agents using any device, in any location and integrates with multiple applications seamlessly.

Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Puzzel is passionate about delivering innovative customer interaction solutions for contact centres and mobile environments.
For more information please visit Puzzel

Press contact:

Mary Phillips/Andreina West
PR Artistry Limited
T: +44 (0)1491 845553
E: mary@pra-ltd.co.uk



(i) ContactBabel’s “The Inner Circle Guide to Cloud-based Contact Centre Solutions (3rd edition 2018)”
(ii) Techtarget