In the present era, it is essential to engage customer queries promptly. Gone are the days when businesses depended on traditional landline phones to resolve customer needs. Presently, customers are reaching out through different communication channels, and this challenging factor is addressed through Contact Center Technology.

This is a customer-focused technology that is here to bring a lot of advantages, especially for small businesses that are struggling with financial expenses. Let us learn more about Contact Center Technology and how it can revolutionize different businesses.

A Contact Center is a technology that allows a team of agents to handle all incoming and outgoing calls & other customer communication modes such as phone calls, emails, webchats, social media interactions, SMS, video & audio conversations, etc.

If in case a customer is looking to book an airline ticket, inquire about a credit card change, or want to troubleshoot the issue with the laptop, they may immediately want to speak with a customer service executive. The contact medium can be in different modes based on their comfort, and it is mandatory for a business to address and resolve it instantly.

They are different from call centers as they address issues of customers apart from traditional calls by supporting them through various communication mediums. They also provide deep analytics into your business data, where you can get high-quality interactions that can drive advanced business growth.

Contact Center Technology supports different business functions. They can be referred to as ‘call center technology’, where agents will be responsible for handling customer calls alone. Or can also be referred to as ‘multichannel contact centers’ where agents can handle calls and other communication modes such as email, social media, web chats, etc.

Moreover, Contact Centers allow an omnichannel approach to customer interactions. They also allow seamless interactions across various channels like phones, emails, chatbots, social media, etc. Hence, they are considered to provide more personalized and consistent.

Contact Centers are of different types, which include:

As the name suggests, Inbound Contact Centers only handle incoming and inbound transactions. This means that agents here will handle inbound calls only. In this case, staff in another department will handle everything end-to-end. An inbound call center will have multiple call routing features such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Auto attendants, call queueing, call recording, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), call transfer,click-to-call, etc.

An Outbound contact center will be responsible for growing sales, conducting surveys, gathering feedback, etc, to deliver enhanced customer service. This can be achieved by handling outbound calls to customers.

Multichannel contact centers refer to the ability of agents to handle customer queries through different communication channels. It also includes inbound call centers which means handling incoming calls. You can get complete access to call management features and will also get detailed reporting & analytics for different communication channels. Although all channels are present here, they are not integrated and are brand-focused.

Omnichannel has the same functionalities as a Multichannel contact center but provides a holistic view to the customer. This contact center will also have access to multiple communication channels that are synched in real-time. Hence, when a previous customer makes a call to the business, there is no need to speak with the previous agent as the details remain updated, and any agent can proceed to resolve the customer query.

On-premises contact centers are the traditional ones that are used by different businesses, such as financial institutions and other data-sensitive industries. They are dependent on a physical location, unlike desk phones, and hence come with a lot of drawbacks. Thanks to cloud contact centers, which are a savior and come with loads of features.

Cloud or Virtual Contact Centers is a contact center where customer interactions happen through the Internet. There is no need for physical installation of software in a fixed location or office. Your agents are free to work from anywhere around the world with an internet-connected device. A Cloud Contact Center software will ask you for a username and password, you are free to begin with customer interactions.

The best Contact Center technology is said to provide enhanced customer service by offering limited waiting time, personalized interactions, greater outreach, and quick complaint resolutions. By concentrating on customer experience, these contact center systems will provide increased satisfaction, loyalty, and referrals from old customers.

Advanced call routing tools that operate through Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology can offer the facility of managing a huge volume of calls and inquiries across different channels. This can increase the agents' productivity and provide the capability to handle more interactions simultaneously with the available agents.

AI Contact Centers provide higher insights and transparency with CRM integration. Hence, businesses can gain greater visibility to understand customer expectations, behaviors, and preferences. Predictive analytics and feedback collection are the pillars of decision-making strategy.

Contact Centers that work with VoIP Phone Systems are known for the cost-savings factor. Businesses can make use of this cutting-edge and advanced technology which updates new features frequently at a budget-friendly pricing.

Most of the contact centers will have a dedicated customer support and sales team to bring in numerous leads, close dealing, booking appointments, etc. This can thereby increase the overall revenue of the business.

You can easily integrate your contact center software and customer relationship management software (CRM) in a single click. Hence, when you receive a call from the customer, you can know who is calling along with their call history and other extensive information. By providing this feature to your customers, you can enhance customer experience.

Along with CRM, businesses can also integrate social media channels and open the room for inquiries there. Platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook are commonplace for businesses to get hold of customers easily. Contact Centers makes this process easy by providing integration capabilities. Agents can reply to customer inquiries then and there without leaving the dashboard.

Call Routing offers the flexibility of routing the call to the internal team or available agents in real time based on certain criteria. There are different ways of routing, such as round-robin, direct routing, skill-based routing, time-based routing, etc. You can choose any of these and direct the calls to the agents.

If agents are unavailable, the voicemail feature allows customers to submit their queries, which are addressed quickly by the agents upon their return. In addition to call routing, contact center technology provides omnichannel support where agents will be available across all channels and instantly resolve customer queries.

In order to move with the most advanced routing procedure where you can know who is calling their previous call records and direct them to the most qualified agent. With appropriate agent routing, you can be more specific about the customer and provide a response.

Advanced Call Routing also knows whether there is a long queue information on the calls in that queue, and offers a callback feature when the qualified agent is available. Added things such as booking appointments, making payments, status tracking, etc can be done with IVR without human intervention.

Contact Center technology provides an end-to-end call analytics feature. You can have complete access to analyzing every call along with the agents who handled it. In addition to calls, you can also analyze customers. This means that when a customer calls you, you will get to know the customer’s complete journey with your business. When looking at their past data, you can also get to know the drawbacks of where you went wrong.

Conversational Analytics is yet another feature that you can get with Contact Center technology. When customer analytics are applied over specific conversations, they are termed conversational analytics. You can also analyze different forms of customer conversations from various channels and make futuristic decisions based on them.

In addition to customer analytics and monitoring, businesses can also measure performance and quality with Contact Center software. Quality monitoring can be done by checking on agent’s calls or transactions and determining if they are doing a great job.

If you filter out flagged calls stamped by customers, you can get to know the performance of the agents and provide training based on it. With quality monitoring, you can learn about repeated issues and customer complaints, arrange training sessions, and escalate agents or customer issues that need immediate intervention from senior staff.

By understanding the more feasible benefits of Contact Center Technology, it is wise to switch from a traditional phone that works through Private Branch Exchange (PBX). If you consider contact center examples from our previous clients, they have a good track of positive feedback by making this decision with us.

We consider recent technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and embed them into the software to deliver rich customer experience. You can contact us and learn more about our product with a free demo session from our experts. Get in touch with us for a free trial.