27 November 2018
To remain competitive, businesses must pay more attention than ever to the customer experience, putting the customer at the heart of the service and adapting to meet changing needs. However, many businesses still do not have a professional solution to support this journey and have separate systems in place for telephony and contact centre operations. We believe customers already using Skype for Business (SFB) online might be missing a trick when it comes to improving the customer care department, in this article we explain why.
Leveraging the features of SFB in the contact centre. - Think of the possibilities!
A Microsoft SFB deployment is designed to enable a digital workforce by providing a simplified collaboration infrastructure that is easy to use and manage. By combining calling, conferencing, video and sharing into one platform, your IT team increases communication reliability, improves value, and reduces costs by eliminating redundant systems. For the workforce, a unified communications platform unleashes creativity and increases agility, productivity and employee engagement. If this functionality could be rolled out further, to the contact centre, think of the possibilities. Leveraging the features of SFB would certainly enhance services to the customer and enable businesses to remain competitive while filling the gap between telephony and contact centre operations.
Now, this is a reality…
Geomant’s Contact Expert (CE) leverages maximum value from your existing Microsoft investment by delivering powerful multichannel and multi-task contact centre functionality, directly on the Microsoft SFB platform. Being a native application means it’s simple to configure and with an “out-of-the-box” integration it's affordable as there's no need for any bespoke services.
The solution encapsulates voice, email, web chat, social media and video conferencing. Customer interactions have full context and are automatically routed to contact advisers according to their skillset. As with many of the new breed of technology solutions, CE is easy to administer from within the Contact Centre (e.g. changing queues, recording messages, emergency mode), rather than having to rely on help from ICT support. A browser-based Portal lets administrators and supervisors access all the settings, as well as monitoring and reporting tools from anywhere, on any devices so making it agile to manage. A graphical IVR designer makes it easy to create and modify workflows, voicemails, automated messages and call back processes. It also has the possibility of collecting customer data and integrating it with other applications and databases, and vice versa, helping the contact centre to transition agent workload to automated processes (e.g. online payment services).
Traditional voice channels are enhanced, providing the customer with the ability to request a call back rather than queuing to speak to an agent. Staff are provided with 'screen-popping', so the system automatically finds the customers CRM record before the call/email is answered. It allows the agent to consult CRM before answering the call, so they are better prepared, saving time and impressing the customer that their information is immediately available at the fingertips of the staff. And all from a familiar system meaning agents feel more comfortable using the software and training time is reduced.
Information produced by CE is wide-ranging and can be used to help businesses know, understand and segment their customers better, as well as manage the contact centre far more responsively. Importantly, this intelligence can be utilised for strategic decision making, providing management with the information required to ensure good governance.
With CE being provisioned from the cloud, hosted on Microsoft Azure, it's inherently secure, flexible and can be rapidly deployed - meaning you can be up and running, ready to reap the benefits of a streamlined telephony and contact centre solution in as little as a few hours.
Let’s wrap this up.
A massive opportunity exists for SFB customers to take advantage of Contact Expert by extending SFB into the contact centre, leveraging existing investments while turning customer care into a well-oiled machine.
If you’d like more information on Contact Expert, please click here
Note: Geomant follows closely the evolution of SFB in to Microsoft Teams so our customers can safely use our products as it will always stay compatible with Microsoft’s flagship UC and collaboration platform.