7 Ways to Improve Customer Engagement with Call Center Integrations

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Customer service is the backbone of every organization. It helps businesses to improve their brand and consumer relations. It does not matter how many interactions an organization has with its customer base, the kind of customer experience it delivers determines its success. To meet customer’s expectations, businesses must be prepared to engage its customers with great customer service.

The arena of customer service support has to provide broader capabilities to serve the customer in the best possible way and that too at an affordable cost. A wide range of related technologies, functions, architectures, features, and services are required to provide a feature-rich solution. Contact center suite must have these either as core offerings or as third-party integrated components. At times a set of routines, protocols, and tools are needed for building software applications for seamless communication between various applications to ensure a smooth flow in the system and ease of usage. Such integrated platform helps contact centers to work as a unified system. To achieve this, the contact center landscape is shifting its focus towards the integrated and holistic view of customer touch points across the buyer journey. Discrete customer interactions using multiple siloed communication channels are being replaced by an omnichannel solution. The convergence of context-driven and multi-channel interactions is transforming contact centers into Customer Engagement Centers(CEC).

What are the prime factors that businesses have to focus on?

Omnichannel Support

A customer engages in multiple activities across the customer life-cycle. A customer wants to approach customer service support team from any channel as per his convenience. Customers Customers in today’s hyper-connected world want ease of communicating with brands via diverse channels like Facebook, mail, voice, twitter, etc. A contextual response to interactions irrespective of communication channel is what customers expect from brands. This can only be achieved if the contact center software supports Omnichannel interactions which are eventually visible on a single screen to customer service agents. In such a setup, customer service agents can easily track problem history and provide relevant responses.

All the Operational Performance Data in one package

Contact center managers preferably look for Contact Center Infrastructure(CCI) as a product from a single source. They do so to have cradle-to-grave reporting, monitoring, and easier system management. This saves the efforts of moving across siloed systems. Flexibility to adapt to business processes, enable automation, process unification are the other key areas which they look for.

Integration of applications and products

There may be an instance where one vendor can’t provide a solution for all of your contact center and customer service needs. Applications are required to be integrated with your contact center software to make the process much easier. Finding out the requirements that are to be integrated and how to seamlessly integrate them is a key concern.

Must have Capabilities to deliver seamless customer experience

#1. Integration for Telephony

The interaction channels can smoothly and quickly integrate through any of these approaches:

  • URL Based Integration where you integrate with a third party system and invoke the other party’s URL at different integration points.
  • Web Toolbar Integration lets you integrate call center software with another party’s telephony. In this, the telephony functionality is provided in the form of a toolbar that can be placed anywhere on other party’s webpage that supports iframes.
  • Marketplace based Integration is in which product or service information is provided by multiple third parties in a marketplace, wherein transactions are processed by the marketplace operator. Any party integrating through this approach can have their application in the marketplace of the third party which can be installed as per the business requirement.

#2. Mobile SDK

Today’s world revolves around technology and speed. People want a quick response to anything they seek whether it is a piece of information, some kind of service, transportation, communication or any other aspect of their life. A complete UI framework that gives instant access to support portals can be incorporated in your iPhone or Android apps. It lets you get started simply and efficiently. This can benefit customers in multiple ways such as:

  • Intuitive medium to enable customers to send/receive messages
  • Increases Customer Engagement
  • Faster time to market.
  • Easier platform to give feedback

#3. Customer Relationship Management Software(CRM)

The Primary purpose of a CRM is to:-

  • Organize, track, and manage all customer information, activities, and conversations in one place.
  • Help teams better understand customers.
  • Save agent time, cut down the efforts on toggling between screens.
  • Ensure delivering the right message at the right time.

This can either be achieved by going for an in-house CRM or by using ready, plug in and play connectors for CRMs. A seamless integration enables an organization to use telephony infrastructure along with available customer information thus, delivering context-based services to the customers and creating a wow customer experience.

#4. Helpdesk

While nurturing customer relationships, you have to commit to your customers for easier and quick query resolutions. To achieve this, contact center software solutions should have a helpdesk that could pull out details about the queries raised by customers from varied channels to provide them with contextual responses. Helpdesk can be an inbuilt solution from a single Contact center solution vendor or can be integrated with third-party offerings. Helpdesks provide a streamlined support to reduce customer effort and improve their satisfaction.

#5. Messaging

Integrating messaging is beneficial in a number of ways such as:

  • Enables customers to connect to messaging app of their choice.
  • Help in extending business communications
  • Help users to avail customer support from anywhere in the world.

A Live chat that is compatible with popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Line, Viber, Twitter and many more is what is in demand. With the availability of these channels, customers can easily approach support executives and they can convey their concerns from anywhere at any time.

#6. BI Capability

Business operations persona has following requirements for management of business functionality:

  • Insightful and powerful analytic dashboard
  • Quality and comprehensive analytical reporting
  • Review of organization-wide performance
  • Improve efficiency of the resources

BI Integration helps pull data and generate a dashboard and data-set that helps in creating and sharing reports easily. A solution that provides real-time dashboards, monitoring capabilities, stats wallboards
can cater to all these requirements and help in streamlining business processes.

#7. Workforce Management(WFM) Solution

The head of an organization needs a software that helps him manage staff scheduling and optimize the productivity of the employees. Powerful and robust workforce management software(WFM) is essential for accurate, insightful and timely statistics around forecasting, scheduling, real-time monitoring and performance management. Performance monitoring is much more important in customer service sector. A contact center software that has historical call detail information can be used to generate call volume forecasts. This helps in determining the agent loading requirements and associated schedules. It gives a picture of who are the most engaged users, which campaigns have more load, how to manage traffic of the incoming interactions. This solution can be either inbuilt or can be integrated with a third-party vendor as per the business needs.

To clinch the requirements of a CEC, multiple applications are needed in a bundled suite to quickly meet customer demands. Ameyo has an optimum solution-Ameyo Fusion CX to leverage the overall performance of a contact center solution seeker and help create CX memories.

improve customer service with CTI