Crossing Boundaries for Inbound Call Center

Cloud communications provide myriad benefits for organizations, including speed of deployment, the ability to future-proof infrastructure and applications, business continuity, predictable monthly payments, and many more. Most organizations turn to the cloud in order to cost-effectively access enhanced capabilities while eliminating the complexity of deploying and managing premises-based solutions. Cloud-based contact center solutions offer additional benefits, notably the ease of adding or removing agents as needed based on fluctuating or seasonal traffic, ease of deploying remote or at-home agents, and ease of adding multichannel services.

Organizations that have deployed hosted inbound call center solutions are finding additional benefits they may not have anticipated — notably, the breaking down of boundaries. Once a contact center expands from a single location, complexity and cost can begin to have a major impact on efficiency. Most agree that a single contact center, regardless of size, runs much more efficiently from a staffing perspective than multiple contact centers. The second boundary is walls. Not necessarily physical, but the walls between the agents in the contact center and the subject matter experts they need to assist in resolving customer issues. These walls exist whether the organization has a single large contact center or multiple sites.

For most inbound call centers, providing a “single face to the customer” is important to provide the best possible service experience. As customers have more options to choose from as to how they want to interact (call, email, chat, SMS, and so on), it becomes even more imperative to address a single pool of agents to handle the entire inbound request for service. In trying to achieve better efficiency, smaller groups of agents dispersed around a campus or the globe become exponentially harder to manage with each new media type that customers are forcing on the contact center.

When you think of a typical contact center, you probably think of a large, non-descript room filled with agents sitting in cubicles wearing headsets and looking frustrated. While this scenario is still the norm, things are starting to change.

Contacts centers have evolved from specialized isolated cost centers to revenue centers, providing not only the opportunity for cross-selling and upselling, but for providing exceptional customer service, leading to long-term customer loyalty. A growing number of companies are finding that in order to serve customers in the best manner possible, all workers, or specialized individuals such as product experts, should be enabled to interact with customers and provide customer care.

By providing a simple and efficient way to access subject matter experts or professionals who have the expertise to resolve a customer’s issue in a timely fashion, companies can not only increase first contact resolution, but can increase customer satisfaction while minimizing agent frustration.