Call Analytics: Enabling Customer-Facing Teams of Any Size

Bridging the Gap – UCaaS Meets CCaaS

For businesses focussed on delivering great customer engagement, cloud-based contact centre features are an excellent enhancement to any unified communications solution. Managers and their teams gain access to a wide range of contact centre capabilities to fully understand the customer experience.

Of course, call centre capabilities are not just about receiving and making calls. They include supervisor functionality, KPI monitoring, notifications, agent capabilities, CRM integration, extensive analytics, customer journey analysis, call recording, sentiment analysis; the list goes on.

Small and mid-market sized enterprises are major beneficiaries of these flexible cloud services since they can be purchased on a per user per month basis. These organisations tend to have multiple customer-facing teams in support, sales and account management and are now working from a mix of home and office locations.

Supervisor and agent collaboration is becoming a key area for UC contact centre operations.  When customer facing agents are able to easily communicate with supervisors in real time, and across different channels, first call resolution becomes more achievable and in turn, customer satisfaction rises. At the same time, supervisors need to know that their team is delivering a high-quality service and can easily identify areas for improvement.

While team and individual performance management is clearly key, it is also important that supervisors are able to adjust resources for different times of day, perhaps to support a new marketing campaign or to cover a key team member if their home internet fails.  The supervisor can also monitor call quality metrics to ensure that their communications infrastructure isn’t damaging to customer experience.

We are seeing demand for all of these features in environments that you wouldn’t typically consider to be a call centre; really, it’s anywhere that customer-facing teams exist. In this new hybrid world, contact centre capabilities coupled with UC analytics enable businesses to truly understand customer experience. Identifying how a customer first made contact and the routes they took through the organisation, both in and outside the contact centre, help to understand the effectiveness of every touchpoint in the business, throughout the whole journey. For many, however, even implementing just one or two key features may make a massive impact on the success of their operations.

Driving Forces 

The huge growth in UC services has changed the way businesses communicate with their customers, which in turn is driving an increased focus on customer experience. Add to this the fact that in many cases, businesses are now able to compete globally, and that companies so focussed on getting through the pandemic are keen to retain customers, and it’s easy to see why improvements in customer experience are so in demand. Cloud contact centre capabilities deliver the insights needed to truly understand customer experience – particularly when people are working from multiple locations – and without this understanding, improvements are difficult to make.

However, it’s not all about customer experience; the employee experience benefits too. Analytics and visibility help businesses to understand who needs more support, and allows managers to communicate goals and share knowledge about progress more easily. This support directly contributes to employee wellbeing, which has become more important than ever.

The exciting thing about contact centres in the cloud is that this wealth of functionality is now accessible and affordable to all types of organisations, paying as they go for the features they need, for as many people that need them.

Cloud Call Centre Features and the Opportunity for the Channel 

There is a high demand for these types of tools, and resellers need to look at how they can provide a seamless and simplified customer experience, which is easy to deploy, manage and provision.  Resellers need to ensure the services they deliver are integrated rather than fragmented, which will help their customers to reduce both management and training costs. They need to understand their customers’ needs and select the right subscription model for the right people, in order to deliver the features that match their requirements.

The benefits for resellers are significant. Contact centre features can increase their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and impact customer retention, as well as provide numerous upsell opportunities over time. By taking their customers on a journey, they can solve current issues knowing full well that as the business changes and grows, they can offer further capabilities to complement the portfolio of services, becoming the trusted advisor.

The key is having the right tools in your portfolio to meet customers’ changing needs.