Contact center managers and owners have had to adapt over the past 2-3 years to hybrid working environments, while still maintaining a high level of customer service. The world has changed, and so have the ways that clients want to engage with a business. New technology must be adopted, and agents need that extra helping hand to meet customer expectations. Let’s examine how using 3CX can help with contact center operations.
Multichannel communication all in one place
Providing an easy means for agents to make and receive ‘contact’ is important. Switching between multiple apps, systems, or web browser tabs can make an agent’s life difficult.
3CX offers an easy-to-use and intuitive web client where all customer interactions can take place. This includes making and receiving calls and responding to live chat, SMS, and WhatsApp messages. Providing a single system for agents to operate from means they will quickly and naturally become more adept with the platform.
Because 3CX is a software-based solution, new features are always becoming available. New functionality is added easily and quickly with no additional hardware costs involved.
Easy-to-deploy IP phone options
3CX supports a wide variety of IP phone and headset vendors. This enables contact center owners to pick the correct hardware for their applications and upgrade to new models. All supported IP phones are fully tested by 3CX in-house teams. Owners can invest safely knowing that the devices will work straight from the get-go. Automatic plug-and-play provisioning makes setup easy with no need for in-depth technical or networking knowledge.
Putting customer information at your agent’s fingertips
Customer interactions can become very stressful if agents don’t have all the information they require. This could be because of a breakdown in back office systems or just a general lack of customer information journaling.
3CX offers many ready-to-set-up CRM integrations, along with a CRM integration wizard, so that any REST-enabled system can be integrated. When integrating a CRM or ERP system with 3CX, agents can provide a personalized greeting and get immediate access to customer records. This results in a better customer experience and faster resolution time.
Route calls to the right team
IVR systems are important in alleviating the pressure on switchboard operators. Getting callers to navigate an auto attendant system means that calls are quickly and easily delivered to the right team or department with zero human intervention. 3CX provides easy-to-configure options to set up an IVR using simple drop-down actions. If a more advanced automated attendant is required, the 3CX Call Flow Designer offers functionality including
· Multi-language speech-to-text and text-to-speech
· Voice payment gateways
· Automatic outbound dialler
· Database lookup, and validation
Powerful call distribution among agents
If an agent feels like they are picking up others’ slack, it can take its toll. This problem is not always because of certain agents not doing their fair share of the work. It could be related to how customer queries are being distributed among the team. If call and chat routing have not been optimized correctly, some agents could be bombarded with work while others are putting their feet up thinking that it is a quiet day.
Our contact center technology means that this doesn’t have to be the case. Calls and chat messages can be routed to queues that offer 13 different polling (or delivery) strategies. These options mean agents get a fairly distributed workload. A few of these polling strategies include:
· Longest waiting
· Least talk time
· Fewest answered
· Hunt random start
· Skills-based routing
Keep track of agent performance
Agent performance is key to a contact center’s smooth operation. If there are a group of agents who are not putting in the same effort as everyone else, they can drag down SLA stats across the whole company. However, in the setting of a busy contact center, obtaining these stats can sometimes be difficult due to time or target-based constraints. Wrapping multiple managers up in producing regular reports is not the best use of their time.
Contact center reports provide an easy way for managers to get regular information on agent performance. These can be emailed daily, weekly, or monthly and can include:
· Average queue waiting times
· Team queue lost calls
· Agent login history
· SLA breaches and statistics
· Abandoned chat messages
Remote, hybrid, whatever… global communication is easy
Dispersed working presents its own challenges. But those challenges can be turned into advantages. Using 3CX as a virtual contact center means customer service is easier to deliver globally. Hiring staff in different time zones, who speak different languages or from countries with lower labor costs, is made possible with no additional hardware/software costs. By creating a global workforce of remote workers, a contact center can operate 24/7/365 without keeping an expensive office space running.
How do you keep all your remote agents engaged or in the loop with company updates or regular training? Easy. Simply set up regular team meetings with 3CX Video Conferencing. You can even use 3CX to hold new product launches reaching millions by streaming your conference on YouTube.
Original from：Achieving Smooth Contact Center Operations with 3CX
