By Brendan Sheehan Posted December 2, 2020
In today’s world, customers continue to demand more. Customers look for faster response times, improved information accuracy, and require stronger levels of trust with the companies they do business with.
One growing challenge in the contact center space is the difficulty agents face being able to connect customers with relevant subject matter experts within their organization to answer the customer’s questions quickly and efficiently. Customers and agents are feeling the pain of a disconnected experience resulting from putting customers on hold, leaving question unanswered, or even having to request to call back at another time.
Companies are successfully combatting this disjointed experience by integrating their contact center technology with their unified communications platform, resulting in more effective and seamless customer service solutions. Some of the notable benefits include:
- Better customer experiences
- Stronger office agent collaboration
- Integrated data and analytics
- Reduced cost of communications
Suffice to say, customer experience has become a C-level initiative at many companies and as we have found in talking to our existing clients, many enterprises are struggling with meeting customer needs across channels.
Bridge the Gap Between Your Contact Center and your Unified Communications Platforms
Your contact center and unified communications technologies cannot work independently, they must work seamlessly together in order to deliver the optimum customer experience. This aligns with the idea to make subject matter expertise within the business readily available for your customers.
To best serve customers, contact center agents should be able to place a quick voice call, for example, to someone within the business who can provide the information they need to address the issue at hand, in a flash. Seamless integration between the core contact center systems agents use for communicating with customers and the unified communications (UC) systems designated for business use is vital in making this happen, meaning the walls separating the two must come down. Companies can gain the best competitive advantage when they are able to combine the best-in-class contact center platform with the best-in-class UC platform through seamless integration.
An Example of How this Could Work…
Here’s an example of how a contact center and unified communications integration could work for a national retailer.
- Customer calls customer service for help with a forgotten password to their account. Customer selects “account access” option when prompted by the virtual agent.
- The virtual agent walks the customers through the account password reset process. Once finished, the virtual agent asks if the caller needs additional assistance.
- The customer responds with a request to be connected to a live agent.
- The live agent speaks with the customer to learn more about their request.
- With the customer on the line, the live agent is able search the company directory to see who is available to speak directly with the customer regarding their question or request.
- The agent launches a conference call with the expert and the customer and can choose whether to stay on the line or transfer the call.
- A new sale or opportunity results!
Getting Started
The mutual starting point for both technologies is the cloud which is quickly becoming the universal deployment model for both contact center and unified communications. Whether you’re already running one of these platforms in the cloud or haven’t embarked on that journey quite yet, MacroNet is here to help. One of the leading powers in the industry and numerous successful customer implementations, we know what it takes to build an excellent contact center in the cloud that fully integrates with your unified communications technology. Let’s talk!