Tips on choosing a new CC provider

As customer expectations continue to evolve, companies are under increasing pressure to ensure their contact centre solutions hit the mark. The right contact centre doesn’t just give you a way to connect with your target customer. It’s also a valuable tool in improving sales, enhancing brand reputation, and cultivating brand loyalty.

The modern contact centre needs more than just a crowd of people answering phones. Companies are quickly making the shift to more flexible, cloud-based solutions, where they can support their customers across a range of environments. According to Gartner, by 2022, the CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) deployment model will be the preferred option for more than 50% of companies.

So, how do you choose the right contact centre solution to thrive in this new environment? Here are our top tips to help you make the right decision.

Tip 1: Know Your Channels

The cloud offers endless benefits for communications, ranging from rapid deployment capabilities to easier provisioning and management. A cloud offering can easily be deployed by businesses in a matter of minutes, and a central online portal ensures business leaders can monitor connection quality and staff performance from anywhere.

However, as with any IT solution involving internet connections, security will always be a focus point. This is why trends in UCaaS and CCaaS purchasing are rapidly changing to champion providers who can offer bundled UCaaS solutions complete with built-in security features, like SD-WAN, performance monitoring, and service management.

Choosing the correct vendor capable of offering a fully managed service is the top way to improve UCaaS security according to around 90% of today’s decision makers. Beyond that, here are some of the concepts you need to consider.

Tip 2: Cover the Basics

Once you know which channels you need to address with your contact centre, the next step is covering your communication basics. How many lines do you need for your contact centre, and how easy do you need it to be for your solution to work on multiple environments, for remote and mobile employees? Is provisioning your contact centre easy, and how far can you expand your business with new geographical locations?

When covering the basics for your contact centre, look at:

• Voice quality and reliability: How much of guarantee do you have that your voice conversations will continue to sound professional at all times? What kind of uptime SLA agreements do your vendors offer?
• Geographic redundancy: How much redundancy and disaster recovery support do you have access to? Can your business expand at its own pace across multiple locations as it begins to grow? Can you choose where your data centers are located, and which numbers you have?
• Control and provisioning: Can you provision contact centre tools from a distance to remote workers, and control things like access permissions with ease?

Tip 3: Look for Flexibility and Integrations

Today’s contact centres come packed full of features for customer service as standard- but you may find yourself needing to add your own extra components too. Integrations and APIs are becoming increasingly common in the contact centre, as businesses combine their CC solutions with tools like help desks, workforce engagement management tools, and CRMs.

Depending on your current situation, you might even choose to integrate your contact centre with your UCaaS environment. Having an aligned ecosystem for all forms of communication can be an excellent way to track crucial metrics in the business and keep everyone connected towards the same goals. A great contact centre provider should allow you to make all of the right connections required to make your team more productive and efficient.

Tip 4: Embrace AI and Automation

Artificial Intelligence hasn’t always been a must-have in the contact centre environment, but it’s rapidly capturing more attention in the age of omnichannel customer interactions. AI and machine learning solutions can have a lot of benefits for businesses looking to impress their target audience. For instance, you can use chat bots and virtual assistants to help with things like self-service, giving your customers a new way to solve their problems, while reducing employee stress.

AI systems can also automate repetitive tasks on the behalf of your employees, allowing them to spend more of their time focusing on delivering amazing customer interactions. Tools like virtual assistants can quickly surface information about customers to ensure more personalised conversations, and AI analytics tools can track things like sentiment and trends in conversations. Even if you’re not ready to embrace AI now, it’s best to find a CC solution that can support it.

Tip 5: Reporting, Analytics, and Security

Finally, it’s time to make sure you can keep an eye on all the important metrics and operational elements of your contact centre. The best contact centre solutions will always offer end-to-end visibility into all the KPIs that matter most to your business. A good solution should support both historical and real-time reporting, so you can identify more actionable opportunities for better efficiency and performance. Combined with AI, reporting tools can help you to rapidly pinpoint potential trends in customer needs.

Analytics and reporting tools can also help you keep track of things like security issues, by notifying you when a potential breach of fraudulent event occurs. These tools should be implemented alongside other security solutions, like end-to-end encryption for all of your conversations, and recording solutions with secure storage for compliance purposes. If you have specific requirements for compliance, make sure you check if your service provider can support them.

Choosing your New Contact Centre

An effective contact centre in today’s world is a value generator for any business. It needs to be an environment where you can serve, support, and learn about your customers through multiple unique and valuable interactions. When choosing your contact centre, think carefully about what you need to accomplish with your customer interactions.

Remember, in today’s fast-moving environment, it’s a good idea to ensure you’re ready to evolve at a rapid pace, by looking for a contact centre solution that’s innovative, scalable, and extendable.