How to build a modern contact center with minimal effort
In today's world, where competition is relentless and customers are increasingly demanding, the contact center plays a key role in the success of any company. For organizations in the B2C segment, the task of building communication with a large number of potential and existing customers is especially relevant. In this article, I will talk about the main tasks and challenges that Russian contact centers are now facing, and I will give recommendations that will help them cope with them.
Any successful company is always focused on efficiency, optimization of business processes and costs, increasing customer loyalty and profits. One of the important tools for solving all these problems is a well-organized contact center. The new reality that has recently emerged also presents a number of new challenges that must be taken into account in order to choose the optimal solution.
Main challenges
The first one is the need for import substitution. After a number of foreign providers of contact center solutions left the Russian market, the issue of choosing a reliable domestic solution became more important than ever for companies that used their solutions. Not all domestic solutions fully correspond to the functionality and performance of their Western counterparts, and the transition to Russian products will be labor-intensive and costly.
The answer to this and other challenges can be a software platform for contact center automation, developed by a Russian company specializing in creating solutions for contact center automation. It is also important to make sure that the developer is accredited by the Ministry of Digital Development, and that his products are included in the register of Russian software. This is a big plus, for example, for state-owned enterprises and customers working with government contracts.
Such a comprehensive solution for building a contact center should include a telephony platform with a softphone and an operator “interface”, a module for managing contact center projects, a quality control system and recording agent conversations, tools for predicting workload, as well as voice robots created with using neural networks and natural language processing.
An important limitation for customers is the fact that many contact center solutions are proprietary, that is, they are very difficult to integrate into the company’s existing infrastructure and integrate with other systems, for example, CRM. This leads to the fact that customer information is not fully used, and the efficiency of the contact center is noticeably reduced.
Choose a platform with a modular architecture, which includes a set of various components that can work either in conjunction with each other or completely independently. Each software module must have its own API for integration with other systems, in order to integrate into the existing contact center infrastructure, complementing or replacing software products from other developers that, for some reason, do not suit customers. For example, seamless integration with the company’s CRM system – 1C or Bitrix24 – or the ability to integrate any of the automation platform modules into any existing contact center system is important, so that for the end user all this is perceived as a single product.
Thus, depending on the problem that the business needs to solve, the customer can use one or another software module separately or build a turnkey contact center platform from them.
A serious barrier to the implementation and maintenance of contact centers can be high cost of solutions. Not all companies can afford to use the most modern products. This applies to companies of various sizes that have a need to provide quality service to their customers. These are mainly representatives of such industries as retail trade, financial services, telecommunications, tourism, healthcare, education, technical support and other areas of activity where there is a need for prompt and high-quality communication with clients.
The cost of implementing a contact center automation platform may vary depending on the scale of the project, the number of integrated solutions and other factors.
Choose solutions that are primarily aimed at companies that sell goods or provide services to end consumers, and their developers are as flexible as possible in pricing, offer individual conditions for each customer and are ready to discuss all the details to find the optimal solution for both parties.
Another challenge – lack of uniform customer service quality standards in the market. This leads to the fact that the level of service in different companies may vary greatly, and customers may be dissatisfied with its quality, which will affect their loyalty to the company.
Therefore, the software platform must include several components designed to automate various aspects of the contact center's activities. This can be a comprehensive software solution for quality control and recording of conversations of contact center specialists with the ability to select call recordings according to certain parameters, both automatically and manually. Additionally, functionality should be provided for interaction with operators based on the results of listening to recordings on the project, scheduling adaptation conversations, conducting coaching, and the possibility of filing an appeal. This solution allows you to track operational metrics, identify bottlenecks in processes, optimize them and improve the quality of customer service and the work of the contact center as a whole.
Many customers have concerns that Implementing a contact center is a long processwhich can take a long time and threaten business downtime.
To avoid this, pay attention to solutions that can conventionally be called “out of the box”, since even in the basic configuration they have quite impressive functionality, which allows them to be implemented in a very short time. But keep in mind that in any case, for each specific customer, the supplier will need to carry out a separate set of measures to configure and integrate them.
When choosing such a “boxed” solution, if everything is done from scratch, the deployment and configuration of an operator’s workstation and a system for managing contact center projects within the customer’s network can be completed in just a week. If we are talking about integrations with other systems, the period will be somewhat longer, but also not critical. It all depends on the specific task set by the customer.
Necessary functionality of a modern contact center
The list of main tasks that need to be solved when operating a modern contact center includes automation, omnichannel, analytics, mobility and technology.
Choose a software platform that is designed specifically for automating contact centers and solving a wide range of problems. Each of the solutions included in it must have functionality to significantly simplify the work of operators, managers, supervisors and the company as a whole.
It should include a module for quality control and recording conversations of contact center specialists, which I already mentioned above. Also, the operator’s workplace should provide centralized access to all necessary information about the project and the subscriber, convenient tools for servicing and processing any incoming calls, including voice and non-voice channels (e-mail, chat, instant messengers, social networks), and outgoing calls .
The project management module will allow you to create, flexibly configure and manage work on each project. It should have functionality for automatic call routing, call recording, operator performance analytics, monitoring of remote contact center specialists and other features that simplify work.
Systems for automating operator schedule planning and load monitoring are designed for planning work schedules, accounting for vacations and sick leave, load forecasting and other tasks related to managing staff working time. They allow you to increase employee loyalty by involving them in proactive work using requests for changing assigned shifts and shift exchange functions. To increase the transparency of employee performance analysis, they should include reporting tools and dashboards.
An important addition to software products in a modern contact center are voice robots, which allow you to create and configure voice assistants to automate answers to frequently asked questions, process requests from clients and other tasks related to automating the work of a contact center. Nowadays, their development also uses neural networks and natural language processing technologies.
On the speed of implementation, ease of use and fault tolerance contact center is influenced by the type of automation platform chosen. All these parameters are much higher if it is cloud-based; all products included in it work on the “thin client” principle, that is, they do not require installation on a local computer, but work on any device connected to the network through a browser. Such cloud solutions can be hosted either within the customer’s network in an On-prem format, or provided remotely using a SaaS model from the supplier’s servers. At the same time, check with the developer that for the reliability and protection of the platform, advanced technologies are used, such as Kubernetes, which ensure high application speed and fault tolerance.
conclusions
A contact center is an important tool for any company that wants to be competitive, improve the quality of service and customer loyalty, reduce costs and increase sales.
When choosing a solution for building a contact center, the customer must take into account several criteria: the size of the business, the industry that may require specific functions, the budget for the project, and most importantly, it is important to choose a reliable contact center platform provider who has created universal and intuitive clear work solutions that will meet all user needs and help them increase productivity, efficiency and comfort during use.
On the Russian market there are convenient software products for automating contact centers that meet all these criteria. The main thing is to choose the best from all the options, and from the best, the most affordable and best suited to the tasks of your business.
