Contact center solutions help businesses and contact center managers to enhance efficiency, improve quality assurance, boost agent performance, and create a culture of continuous improvement that results in better customer experiences.
What are contact center solutions vs. call center solutions?
Because contact centers enable customers to interact with a business via any channel, contact center solutions support communications, monitoring, and analytics for phone, email, chat, SMS text, social media, web, and more. Call center solutions are more focused on telephony since call centers communicate with customers primarily via the phone.
What are the different kinds of contact center solutions?
Contact center solutions offer an array of capabilities to automate and streamline many aspects of operations.
- Interactive voice response (IVR) solutions answer a customer’s call immediately and collect data that helps to route the call to the appropriate department or agent. IVR technology can also route customers to self-service options that allow them to resolve their needs on their own.
- Workforce management software helps contact center managers predict the volume of communications on each channel, maintain optimum staffing levels, and manage agent schedules.
- Text analytics captures and analyzes written conversations in email, text, social media, web, and other channels.
- Speech analytics captures and analyzes audio-based conversations over the phone.
- Call recording software records and stores audio from calls between agents and customers.
- Predictive dialing software automatically places calls for agents in outbound call centers to increase efficiency.
- Automatic call distributors (ACD) route incoming calls to the agent who can best resolve a customer’s issue. ACD solutions connect customers with agents more quickly and increase agent utilization.
- Contact center analytics platforms collect data, monitor metrics, and track key performance indicators (KPIs) that help contact centers improve efficiency, increase agent performance, and enhance customer experiences.
What are the essential features of a contact center solution?
To optimize operations, contact center solutions must deliver several important capabilities.
- Seamless omnichannel communications. Customers expect to easily communicate with businesses across all the channels they choose. Contact center solutions must allow customers to start a conversation via email and move to chat or phone without missing a step or needing to repeat details.
- Tools to capture unsolicited feedback. Every day, customers share vast amounts of unsolicited feedback that reveal their needs, opinions, preferences, and motivations. With tools that extract intelligence from this gold mine of data, contact centers can better understand the customer mindset, gain visibility into agent performance, and optimize processes to deliver better experiences.
- Integration with other systems. Contact center solutions must unite data silos and disparate data sources to provide a comprehensive view of contact center metrics and KPIs. Contact center technology must also integrate easily with software for CRM systems, accounting, marketing, and other contact center functions.
- Effortless scalability. Contact center solutions should accommodate both temporary spikes in the volume of communications as well as the rapid growth of contact center operations.
- Cloud-based software. Cloud-based contact center solutions enable IT teams to offload to a third-party provider the routine tasks of deploying, maintaining, and updating software. Cloud-based technology also makes it easier to support a remote or hybrid contact center workforce.
- Best-of-breed security and compliance features. Encryption and other advanced security measures are essential to contact center solutions since conversations with customers often touch on sensitive financial data or personally identifiable information. Solutions must also enable contact centers and agents to easily comply with regulatory requirements and local privacy laws.
What are contact center analytics?
Contact center analytics involves technology, processes, and practices for collecting and analyzing data to monitor performance and increase efficiency. Contact center analytics can provide insight into customers’ wants and needs, behavioral trends, product ideas, safety issues, process inefficiencies, gaps in agent training or knowledge, and areas for targeted improvement.
What are contact center metrics?
To monitor and optimize the performance of agents and processes, contact centers track and analyze a broad range of metrics, including:
- Average handle time (AHT): the average time it takes an agent to handle a call, including talk time, hold time, and after-call work.
- First call resolution (FCR): the percentage of calls that agents resolve on the initial contact.
- Quality scores: an overall score of a caller’s experience that helps to pinpoint inefficiencies, areas for improvement, and additional training to improve agent performance.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT): a measure on a continuum of how satisfied customers are with their contact center experience.
- Net promoter score (NPS): a measurement of the likelihood that a customer will recommend the contact center experience or the company to other people in their social circle.
- Average speed of answer (ASA): the average time it takes before a customer’s call or message is answered by an agent.
- Abandoned call rates: the percentage of customers who hang up before speaking with an agent.
How does conversation intelligence improve contact center analytics?
Traditionally, contact center analytics have been driven by data collected via customer surveys or manual reviews of call recordings. However, these methods capture only a small fraction of the total conversations that agents have with customers each day. Conversation intelligence uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to capture and analyze 100% of conversations across all channels, providing more accurate metrics, greater visibility of operations, and deeper insight into the customer experience.
What contact center solutions does CallMiner provide?
CallMiner Eureka is the world’s most comprehensive conversation intelligence platform, enabling contact centers to capture and analyze customer conversations across all channels at scale. Powered by AI in machine learning, Eureka converts unstructured information in audio and text-based conversations into structured data that can be searched, analyzed, categorized, and scored for quality and other metrics. By determining both what is said in a conversation and how it is said, CallMiner delivers deeper insight into the experience of customers as well as the performance of agents.
CallMiner Eureka solutions enable contact centers to:
- Analyze interactions at the deepest level to interpret nuance, identify patterns, score emotion, and shed light on new opportunities and areas for improvement.
- Correlate text-based and audio interactions through analytics, even when channels are not integrated.
- Track interactions across channels, creating a visual map of every step.
- Convert the voice of the customer into actionable insight with unique categorization that resolves intent and emotion from ambiguous language.
- Identify, prioritize, and report on the insights and intelligence that matter most to different departments and leaders.
