“There has been a shift recently from trying to engineer costs out of the contact centre to addressing the customer experience. If customers want to make contact by e-mail, SMS, Instant Messaging, faxes or webforms then contact centres need to be equipped with the technology, processes and training to serve their customers this way.
Contact centres should take a phased approach to technology. Even a voice-only contact centre delivers a range of functionality. Once contact centres understand this, they can add other iterations such as the ability to handle e-mails and faxes.
The most basic form of technology should enable contact centres to capture, route and report on interactions. The most advanced should enable contact centres to offer a highly-personalised service, ensuring that every interaction is dealt with at the right time by the agent with the appropriate skills tool kit and through the right medium.
Vendors are including a widespread variety of technology options in their service offering. These include presence technology, enabling supervisors to view which agents are available or away from their desks, ill or on holiday which helps with continual staff management. Agents can also see which other colleagues are available, selecting experts in other departments if calls need to be transferred or the expert conferenced in on the call.
Other technology options include virtual queuing, preferred agent routing, last agent routing and call monitoring. Virtual queuing enables callers to retain their place and be called back when an agent becomes available. Preferred agent routing matches calls to agents with the appropriate level of knowledge. Last agent routing checks call history to put a caller through to an agent they have previously spoken to. Silent monitoring and call recording is used by supervisors to monitor performance and train agents.”