5 Cloud Contact Center Best Practices for Customer Support Managers
In 2019, top pain points in digital CX included long wait times for customers, the need to repeat information to customer support agents, and frequent transfers.
Now, with the emergence of remote work, self-service, and digital transformation, contact center managers are looking for ways to resolve pre-existing customer pain points while also improving both customer and agent experience in today’s new normal.
To help you future-proof your contact center, we’ve outlined five cloud contact center best practices that aim to produce operational efficiency, customer insights and retention, and ultimately, revenue.
Because today’s customers are tired of repeating information and wasting time on brands – it’s time to give them what they want.
1. Keep all information and interactions in one place
According to CCW Digital research, 96% of businesses understand the importance of serving customers in their preferred channels – and 87% have active plans to better honor channel preference.
However, having multiple conversations with the same customer on different channels can easily become a frantic experience for customer support agents – and for customers, too.
To avoid miscommunication and repetitive queries, implementing a digital cloud contact center solution can help you achieve your long-term contact center goals.
A digital cloud contact center solution, such as Conversations, keeps all agent and customer interactions in one place – no matter the channel. It combines all relevant customer information from integrated systems such as your CRM, ticketing, and eCommerce platforms, to help agents deliver personalized customer support.
Contact center managers can use a cloud contact center solution to access real-time data insight about customers and agents, helping them optimize their processes. They also have all necessary insight to keep agents productive while they work remotely – and can track overall contact center, or specific agent, performance accordingly to overcome barriers.
Using a single web interface for all customer interactions enables agents to:
- handle more than one query at a time
- switch between different channels and customers in one place
- view customer context cards that highlight previous purchases, loyalty statuses, and more
- refer to full conversation history to pick up where the customer left off
All in all, a digital cloud contact center solution helps contact centers reduce average handle time and increase first contact resolution.
2. Ensure reach using natively integrated mobile channels
Conversational automation is not only essential in today’s contact center, it’s channel-agnostic – meaning it’s both exponentially beneficial and easy to incorporate.
Through a cloud-driven infrastructure, the intelligence used to build an interaction in one channel can be repurposed in another channel, and the advantages are mostly seen using channels that come native on customers’ phones.
For example, if you choose to build conversational automation into integrated voice response (IVR), you can convert the voice dialogue into SMS or RCS message prompts without having to silo the two platforms – which reduces friction for contact center agents and customers alike.
Incorporating SMS and RCS into your omnichannel customer service strategy will help you:
- increase customer loyalty and trust in brand communication through short, personalized messages directed at any targeted audience
- simultaneously raise marketing awareness and value through brand name and logo inclusion, clear descriptions, link previews, and identity verification, serving as both an operational efficiency and marketing tool
- explore multiple route parameters in real time to find the shortest path for every message delivered – generating faster support and creating frictionless experiences for customers
- appeal to targeted consumer demographics by creating short messages in any language, format, or length through programmable encoding
3. Enrich customer conversations using chat apps
According to CCW Digital research, more than 71% of consumers are open to using chat technology. – including chat apps such as Viber, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.
Chat apps are one of the leading ways businesses can deliver a conversational customer support experience.
Through chat apps, businesses and customers can:
- exchange text and voice messages,
- make voice and video calls, as well as
- share rich media including images, documents, and location
This speeds up otherwise tedious processes since customers can receive all the information they need in one place in real time, over the apps they use most on a daily basis.
Additionally, chat apps enable businesses to automate their support using chatbots to answer frequently asked questions.
By being available on the channels customers prefer, businesses can deliver an omnichannel contact center experience that increases customer engagement and satisfaction.
4. Be easily accessible using Live Chat
As customers search through the content of your website, trying to figure out which products, solutions, or services are best suited for their needs, it’s important to give them an easy way to reach out to you with questions.
One great way to do this is to implement Live Chat, otherwise known as web chat, on your website. Through Live Chat, customers can get in touch with your agents about specific questions without losing context because they can refer to the content on your website while they simultaneously chat with someone.
It also keeps them engaged with your business longer and eliminates the potential risk of the customer losing interest – which can occur when they leave your website and wait for an agent to contact them a few hours later over a different channel.
Live Chat gives potential leads all the information they need to make a purchasing decision, while also increasing customer retention by enabling instant support and faster first contact resolution.
5. Improve efficiency through chatbot automation
AI is undoubtedly leading the charge in the contact center; 84% of businesses believe chat and messaging bots, specifically, omnichannel bot technology, will become more important in five years. Only 3% believe this form of communication will become less important.
Integrating keyword or AI chatbots into a cloud contact center solution can help contact center managers automate their customer support, resulting in less tedious work for agents. It also enables live agent takeover for customer queries that are more complex and require further attention.
Some additional advantages of adding chatbot automation to your contact center include:
- ability to share appealing rich media to give customers all the information they need in one place through automated self-service, increasing business-to-consumer efficiency, productivity, and CSAT scores
- generating personalized dialogues for customer support, marketing campaigns, transactional notifications to generate richer dialogues with consumers, and ensure customers have every piece of information they need without wasting their time or effort.
- seamlessly extend consumer reach regardless of location – whether remote or on-premise
- lower costs and improve ROI by automating simple tasks, allowing agents free time to focus on human-centric tasks and personalization.
Did you know? Infobip’s Answers lets you deploy AI and keyword chatbots over popular channels including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Live Chat, and more.
Implementing cloud contact center best practices
Using these cloud contact center best practices can help you deliver a faster personalized customer experience on the channels your customers prefer. And, using a digital cloud contact center solution can help you identify contact center problems, instill an omnichannel customer service strategy, and improve overall contact center performance.
To help contact centers adjust to the “new normal,” we’re offering our cloud contact center solution, Conversations, free for the first 60 days. Businesses that sign up for the Conversations Starter package can move to the cloud within 24 hours and will receive 60 days of no agent license fees and free unlimited chatbot sessions, along with a free dedicated consultant.
