The Secret to Effective Contact Center Management

Customers expect a fast, highly personalized response to their inquiries – wherever, whenever, and over whatever channel they contact you. To meet these expectations, you need the right people, services, and resources in place, at the right time. What’s more, you must continually monitor performance across every channel to ensure that each interaction meets key quality and compliance requirements. On top of this, each contact center is unique, so you need to be able to configure your services and workflows in the way that best suits the needs of your organization.

In a nutshell, contact center management is the process of overseeing and regulating contact center operations, in order to deliver the best experience for your agents, supervisors, and customers. This requires a number of applications including:

• Workforce Management (WFM): Forecasting interaction volumes and scheduling the right number and types of agents to successfully support that level of interactions.

• Service Management: Designing IVRs and services, to ensure customers connect to the agent best suited to deal with their inquiry first time, regardless of channel.

• Reporting: Recording interactions across all channels, for a historical and real-time overview of services. This ensures you know exactly what is happening at any time over any channel.

• Quality Management (QM): Evaluating agent performance and tracking KPI and script adherence, to maintain compliance and keep customer trust.

In order to deliver great customer experiences, you need to drive the best performance from your agents to meet your unique business goals. To do this, you need a high degree of configurability and customization, without added complexity.

The secret? What was traditionally sold as separate applications should now be sought within a single solution.

Workforce management, reporting, and QM and analytics are all essential contact center management tools. However, when these systems are not connected, key data stays trapped in silos – where it is difficult to access. A single-stack, fully-integrated solution brings all your workforce optimization tools together in a single, unified environment. You don’t have to worry about complex set-up or supplier relationships. Instead, all your systems work together seamlessly, allowing you to focus on delivering outstanding customer experiences.

By adding new elements to the standard contact center management toolkit, managers have the opportunity to boost the abilities of agents, and transform the customer experience. For example, implementing a Knowledge Management module and elements of gamification for coaching and training purposes, desktop integrations such as Microsoft Teams for enhanced collaboration to back-office teams, and customer collaboration tools such as co-browsing and bot-assisted chat.

Another part of the secret to effective contact center management lies in artificial intelligence (AI). With AI backing each and every application involved in managing the contact center, the functionality of each application skyrockets. On a basic level, AI enables managers to streamline workflows through automation. More advanced applications of AI enable contact centers to deploy intelligent assistants such as Machine Agents. Incorporating AI-backed Machine Agents into your scheduling gives you unparalleled scalability and gives customers access to highly accurate support 24/7/365. Then when applied to quality and compliance monitoring, AI can identify and correct cases of non-compliance and sort interaction by keyword, topic or customer sentiment. This allows you to spot trends at a glance and use this data to improve agent training and overall performance.