Contact centre solutions come in all shapes and sizes, from basic tech or sales support for a small business involving one or two team members fielding calls on a couple of lines, to a fully fledged system with skills-based routing, complex yet intuitive call flow options for diverts and automation; easily upgradable service lines, call data and analytics, and more. There is more to them than may meet the eye, so we thought we would write an article to run through the various solutions, benefits and options.
By way of introduction, Conversant Technology is an expert provider in integrating the Microsoft Teams communications platform with both contact centre and CRM, giving our customers complete visibility over their communications and customer history, call and support history, and a wide range of contact centre solutions, according to the individual needs of our clients.
Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams – enhancing user and customer experience
Microsoft Teams is known as a hub for teamwork that brings together calling, chat and meetings. However, user experiences are most powerful where voice calls are fully integrated within it - which drives adoption and increases productivity as all communications and interactions are seamlessly integrated.
When combined with specialist contact centre solutions, Microsoft Teams goes a step further and improves customer service and experience for helpdesks, service lines, formal and informal contact centre environments through a combination of call routing, recording, analysis, translation and transcription.
This can all be integrated with your CRM, so you have all the information you need about both your customers and your operation at your fingertips, helping you to assess your future needs, adjust your plans, and see which areas of your operation are providing best value or enhancing your customer experience the most.
Increase efficiency and productivity
'Out of the box' specialist contact centre solutions help managers by providing KPI service performance management information, with intuitive dashboards, and additional services such as full analytics and reporting as well as compliance call recording, translation and transcription. They even allow agents to select ‘stop-start’ recording to eliminate unnecessary parts of the conversation, and exception reporting to flag keywords which might, for example, indicate sales of over a defined cost or volume, to group high value clients in one place, or a red flag warning relating to any issue which has been identified.
Contact centre solutions should allow supervisors to join calls, visibly or invisibly, and to monitor agent performance, while the data analysis side enables contact centre managers to pinpoint call flow, agent capacity, waiting times and peak and trough periods, in order to optimise staffing levels.
How it works: a bespoke, holistic solution which allows for organic growth
Integrating your contact centre within Teams enables you to route all calls - directly and exclusively - to your agents based on their 'presence' status.
Beyond the IVR menus, contact centre solutions often also offers ICR services to ensure that Microsoft UC Instant Messaging (chat) requests can be directed to the right person in the team, including by specialist skill set. You just need to select a call flow scenario that best suits your business needs, using a variety of options such as working hours, availability and IVR.
A good provider will also make sure your social conversations are fully joined up, by integrating with your CRM. This will:
- Instantly provide data to agents to improve productivity
- Help you provide swift responses to customers
- Capture information automatically and quickly
- Route calls to agents based on parameters you control
- Direct customers to self-service information, saving them - and you - time and effort
As contact centre solutions are based on subscriptions, updates and upgrades should be automatic. 24/7 support means that the pain of resolving any contact centre IT issues is removed, and if you need to add or remove users, this is sorted at a click.
Your contact centre solution should therefore be fully future-proofed against any end of life PBX system issues, restricted line numbers, or technology moving on – and you get better returns from your Microsoft investment by maximising the use you will be getting from the licences you already have in place.
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