Image of male consumer using phone | 5 Benefits of Building onto Your Existing CCaaS Technology | Authority Software

5 Benefits of Building Onto Your Existing CCaaS Technology

More and more these days, your customers expect to be able to contact your business any time over various channels. An efficient, intelligent customer service response is crucial for fostering repeat business. The CCaaS technology you’re using at your contact center can make or break your customers’ experience with your company and either turn them into brand loyalists or drive their business elsewhere.

Suppose your current CCaaS technology doesn’t operate with a unified desktop. In that case, it’s probably not offering your customers the most efficient experience or providing you with the insights into customer behavior that you need to improve their experience. The good news is you don’t have to overhaul your CCaaS to get better results. Upgrading or expanding your current technologies with Authority’s Designer tools can provide these 5 benefits to your business.

1. Free Up Time Wasted on Monotonous Tasks

Some parts of your agents’ jobs aren’t hands-on interaction with customers, like sending batches of performance report emails or backing up files. These tasks need to be done, but they also mean that each agent interacts with fewer customers daily. An easy solution is to automate these tasks. If your current CCaaS technology can’t schedule tasks, it’s time to consider an extension that will.

2. Provide Consistency and Minimize Human Error

You don’t just want your customer service to be efficient; you want it to be consistent. Every customer who contacts you via your contact center should receive the same standard of care and treatment. An easy way to do this is with the use of scripts. However, a set script won’t be able to support each customer’s needs and questions. You could create different scripts for your agents to use in other circumstances or upgrade your current CCaaS technology to provide branched logic scripts in real-time during calls. As your agent talks to a customer, this program intuitively generates a set of predetermined responses to guide the conversation forward. These interactive scripts follow the natural flow of the conversation but still provide structure for your agents, minimizing human error and increasing customer satisfaction.

3. Store More Data With CCaaS Technology

Storing information for future interactions helps you provide a better experience to your customers each time they contact you. Unfortunately, your current system might have limits on the number of tables or fields it can hold at one time, or data might expire after a certain period. Either you’ll lose crucial customer data, or you’ll have to regularly export and organize data to a third-party server. Upgrading your CCaaS to unlimited storage ensures that you always have the information you need easily accessible.

4. Do More with Your CRM

Your contact center is at the heart of your company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. That’s why it makes sense to integrate your CCaaS technology seamlessly with your CRM program. By unifying both functions into one desktop, your agents can more easily access all the relevant data for a transaction across applications with one set of credentials. Expanding and improving options to configure contact management in your CCaaS allows you to add additional functionality to your existing CRM system without losing any data.

5. Perform Comprehensive Reporting

Close and careful data analysis is key to improving agent performance and providing customers with a better experience. Configuring your own reports allows you to track the metrics that matter most to your business. Whether you want to analyze data collected within your CCaaS technology or import data manually or through a third-party application, you need a system that can seamlessly access your data, generate reports, and export them. Upgrading your reporting capabilities lets you take a more in-depth look at your key performance indicators and optimize your workflow.

How do I expand on my existing CCaaS technology?

Designer by Authority Software leverages native integrations with your existing CCaaS technology to rapidly develop new applications and grant agents on-demand access to relevant data from multiple sources.

If your current CCaaS technology lacks essential functions, adding the features you want is easy without switching over to an entirely new system by using Authority Software’s Designer. Designer builds on your existing CCaaS technology to provide a unified desktop, delivering customer experience intelligence from all available sources, all in one place. Start optimizing your workflow with Designer today.

Key Takeaways

  • Customers want on-demand, high-quality support from your business.
  • Manual tasks limit the number of customers your agents can assist. Automating them through Designer is a great way to enable your call center to increase call efficiency. 
  • Branching logic scripts help ensure consistent quality in customer interactions.
  • Your CRM system and your CCaaS technology are inherently related and should be integrated.
  • Thorough and efficient reporting helps you operate at peak efficiency. Find out how Designer can help you today!
Clip art of check list to boost customer experience | How to Use Quality Assurance Monitoring to Boost Customer Experience | Authority Software

How to Use Quality Assurance Monitoring to Boost Your Customer Experience

It’s not just your imagination—your customer’s expectations for the quality of customer service they receive are at an all-time high. According to the “State of the Connected Customer” report conducted by Salesforce, the modern customer wants more than just quality service. They want proactive service and personalized interactions. The best way to provide quality service is with quality assurance monitoring.

You might have established rigorous customer care standards and training procedures at your contact center. Still, they don’t do you or your customers any good unless they’re being put into practice. Quality assurance monitoring helps you gauge agent performance, correct deficits, and provide your customers with the best possible experience.

What is quality assurance monitoring?

Quality assurance monitoring is how your business guarantees that your products and services consistently meet your set standards. You use audits and other assessments to evaluate if your employees, processes, and systems are delivering the results you expect.

Get Agents More Engaged and Committed to Customer Service

Your contact center agents are the face of your customer experience initiatives. An agent’s interaction with the customer determines whether that customer keeps shopping with you, recommends your business to others, or takes their business elsewhere and possibly posts negative reviews on a public forum. Agents who don’t feel valued or engaged are more likely to become apathetic and less likely to provide the highest quality customer service possible.

One of the main reasons contact center agents experience job dissatisfaction is a lack of timely performance feedback or only receiving negative feedback. A way to consistently provide positive feedback creates a better work environment for your agents and motivates them to go above and beyond for your customers.

Make Calls More Efficient

You’ve probably heard that time is money, especially when it comes to customer service. The modern customer leads a busy life. They don’t have time to spend an hour on hold or be transferred through multiple departments to resolve their issue. More than three-quarters of customers agreed that the best way for a company to provide superior customer service is to value their time.

You can understand the factors involved in each service interaction’s average handle time (AHT) using quality assurance monitoring. Enhanced recording capabilities allow you to carefully screen interactions to see where they could benefit from streamlining. Using these insights, you can adjust your training procedures to deliver a more efficient, time-conscious response to your customers that does not sacrifice care quality.

Ensure Compliance with Script and Other Company Policies

Your contact center already has procedures in place to guarantee a good experience for your customers. Using quality assurance monitoring, you can fine-tune those procedures to be even more responsive and efficient. You can then use quality monitoring to ensure those procedures are carried out correctly. Quickly analyze transcripts to determine if your agents follow scripts accurately and ensure all appropriate actions are taken to help customers. If you notice any skill gaps or deficiencies, you can immediately single out those agents for training and coaching targeted to the areas where they are struggling.

Today’s customers are very concerned about data security and privacy. You probably already have security standards your agents must follow, but all it takes is one mistake to damage a customer’s trust in your business. Quality assurance monitoring can help you ensure that all data your company acquires is handled appropriately and immediately correct any errors.

The Authority Software Solution

A library of transcripts for every customer interaction through your call center provides valuable training resources for new agents. As opposed to the random cherry-picked examples you may have had before, you can now show them how various real-life customer issues were handled either well or poorly. A robust quality assurance monitoring program is the best way to confirm that your agents are equipped to provide the best quality service to all your customers.

Quality Management is not an area where your business can afford to cut corners. Download the whitepaper now to see the facts about quality assurance monitoring and its importance to your contact center.

Key Takeaways

  • Quality assurance monitoring allows you to ensure your customers are receiving the best customer service you can provide.
  • Giving your agents timely feedback improves engagement and motivates them to provide customers with a high-quality experience.
  • Making your contact center more efficient improves customer satisfaction.
  • Quality assurance monitoring helps you provide better training for your agents and quickly identify and correct any compliance issues.
Woman Laughing on Headset with Hand in Air | Learn 4 Ways to Improve Employee Experience With Better Contact Center Management | Authority Software

4 Ways to Improve Employee Experience With Better Contact Center Management

As the effort to meet the customer’s needs becomes more challenging, employees feel the brunt of it. Increased customer expectations have led to employee burnout, which does not lead to an excellent overall customer experience. Contact centers are trying to meet the rising demands of the customer, but that becomes more complicated with technologies evolving daily. This leads contact center management teams to become inefficient and frustrated.

Contact centers exist to deliver quick and efficient customer service to the customer. Employees can feel drained and burnt out when technology is not up to par. When employees are unhappy, meeting the customer’s needs becomes almost impossible. Then, the customers are dissatisfied, and so are the employees.

Workforce optimization (WFO) tools may be the solution many contact centers have sought to improve their efficiency. WFO tools can streamline processes and help combat daily contact center challenges to help things run more efficiently.

How Can We Improve Contact Center Management?
Contact Center Management can be improved with Workforce Optimization (WFO) tools. WFO tools are intended to help businesses achieve better performance and meet the needs of their employees and customers through customized solutions based on the business’s unique needs. WFO tools can consist of various recordings (audio/screen recording), analytics, forecasting, scheduling, and performance management.

4 Ways To Improve Employee Experience

WFO tools improve the employee experience in a contact center by improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and reducing errors when adequately implemented. Here are four ways to improve employee experience with better contact center management.

1. Make Better Decisions

WFO solutions allow contact center management to generate the critical data they need to make informed decisions. With WFO tools, contact center agents can accurately enter detailed information regarding their touchpoints. This data is available to meet the contact center’s many needs and satisfy their customers better, from scheduling the right staff at the right time to monitoring agent activities to identifying areas of inefficiency. Careful analysis allows contact center management to pinpoint performance issues and identify areas that have disrupted productivity or caused customers’ needs to go unfulfilled. Access to better data makes it easier for contact center management to make better decisions that would eventually bring satisfaction to their customers.

2. Meet Customer Demand

One of the most critical things contact center management is responsible for is meeting call volume. More detailed data with the correct information can give contact center management what they need to predict future workload volumes better. Better analysis provides data to calculate the time required to accomplish specific tasks, ensuring the necessary staff is available. This helps to keep agents from being overloaded during their work shifts.

3. Recognize High Performance

With improved analytics features, contact center management can identify high-performing agents. And with quality management solutions, contact center managers can easily recognize rock stars during performance reviews or highlight them during training or staff meetings. When employees feel appreciated and receive positive recognition, that makes them happy. With happier agents, you’re likely to find happier customers.

4. Make Employees Happy

Increased efficiency and retention go hand in hand. It’s hard to have one and not have the other. When employees are given the technology they need to perform their jobs efficiently, they’re likely to be more successful at their jobs and more productive. When employees feel stress relief while performing daily tasks, their productivity increases.

Key Takeaways

  • Employee burnout makes it a challenge for contact centers to deliver quick and efficient service to their customers.
  • Contact center management can be improved with Workforce Optimization (WFO) tools.
  • WFO tools can increase efficiency and productivity to provide for the overall satisfaction of your customers and agents.
  • WFO tools can help improve the employee experience and retention.

Learn More about WFO

WFO tools have the potential to balance the needs of customers, the contact center, and employees by streamlining processes and making them more efficient for everyone involved. These tools can help create a happier work environment while improving customer service when adequately implemented. Read our blog to learn more about using WFO tools in your business.

How CCaaS Providers Support the Goals of the Contact Center

Your customers’ satisfaction, or lack thereof, can make or break your business. When your customers are not happy because of poor customer service, it can cause them to cease working with you and never come back. This is when CCaaS providers may help boost your contact center service and efficiency.

Customer service is the glue that holds everything together between you and your clients — from solving problems to promptly responding to what may seem like simple questions. Positive communication experiences, from a web chat to a phone call, help to promote your company’s success in a big way.

If your customer service feedback is less than pleasing, CCaaS providers may be worth considering to turn your business ratings around.

What do CCaaS providers do?
CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service and is a cloud-based customer solution in cloud-based contact centers for businesses that provide the essential inbound-customer service interactions with the appropriate agents. Rather than having a physical call center, CCaaS provides an alternative solution to customer service. Any business can quickly launch a cloud-based contact center using multiple interaction modes, like a phone call, live chat, email, support tickets, text messages, etc. Thus, CCaaS consolidates all the tools a business needs to interact with its customers seamlessly.

How CCaaS Differs from Contact Centers

While contact centers are an upgrade from call centers (where customers mainly access only phone support), they still fall short of the full range of services that can be done with the help of CCaaS.

Today’s consumers are impatient. They don’t have a lot of time, and they don’t have the time to rely on tools that cost them too much. Most consumers have determined that the most aggravating thing about customer service is being placed on hold, sent to different agents, and explaining the same situation to multiple people. Consumers want immediate response times, and they want an answer to their questions right away.

Most contact centers provide customer support by phone, email, text message, and social media. Most consumers have at least 13 channels they would like to be able to interact with businesses.

5 Ways CCaaS Providers Help Contact Centers

1. Efficient Management

CCaaS allows businesses to more efficiently manage their customer service needs through remote teams using the tools they need to do their jobs successfully. This helps to respond to calls quickly and provide speedy solutions.

2. Use Customer-Preferred Channel

Studies have shown that customers have at least 13 channels of communication they prefer to use to interact with a business. With CCaaS tools, you can quickly and easily give customers access to their preferred channels. Whether that’s SMS, social media, in-app, chat, or phone, CCaaS allows you to meet your customer’s communication preferences.

3. Monitor/Analyze Call History

CCaaS solutions have the capabilities to provide appropriate monitoring and reporting for your call center. With real-time and historical dashboard monitoring, you can analyze call history and other features of your communications history. Discover call patterns and look for the root causes of common problems to quickly decipher how to fix them.

4. Scale at Any Time

CCaaS allows a business to scale up when they need it. Your business may require a small number of agents today, but in a year, it may need three times that number. With cloud-based solutions, you can easily adjust capacity and functionality whenever you need to. It allows your company to grow through improved customer service and helps your communications grow with your company.

5. Improve Customer Satisfaction

When customers have quicker touchpoints and are being met where they want to communicate, based on their preferences, that makes them happy. When agents actively engage with customers at a quicker rate, they can help them more efficiently. Thanks to real-time analysis, agents can easily adjust their approaches to ensure positive interactions with the customer. This makes for an improved customer experience, which equals successful business growth.

Key Takeaways

  • The level of satisfaction of your customers has a great deal to do with your company’s success.
  • Consumers have at least 13 channels they would like to interact with businesses.
  • Most businesses fail to have touchpoints that align with what the customer prefers.
  • CCaaS provides an alternative solution to customer service that allows customers to have a touchpoint from various modes.
  • CCaaS offers businesses features that will help them to manage their calls better, be more efficient, and analyze root causes to solve problems.
  • CCaaS allows businesses to grow their customer service support when needed.

Curious to Learn More?

CCaaS providers are quickly becoming a go-to choice for businesses looking to improve their customer service. By using a CCaaS provider, businesses can manage their customer service more efficiently and provide better support. This enhances customer satisfaction and allows businesses to focus on other growth areas. Read our blog to learn more about the benefits of using a CCaaS provider.

People shaking hands | 7 Steps to Reduce Attrition Rates & Enhance Agent Engagement | Authority Software

7 Steps to Reduce Attrition Rates & Enhance Agent Engagement

Companies in every industry are looking for ways to prioritize employee retention. Contact centers tend to have higher turnover rates due to employee attrition and a stressful work environment. Learning how to reduce attrition rates is key to keeping productive, fulfilled agents in your call center. While employee burnout can happen for several reasons, there are many ways employers can take the initiative to prevent the most common causes of attrition while also improving morale, efficiency, and engagement. Often, quality management and agent engagement overlap and can ensure a better experience for employees and customers.

How can I reduce attrition rates in my contact center?

Many steps can be taken in a contact center to lower attrition rates. A collective effort between hiring processes, ongoing training, and management is important to ensure employee happiness and loyalty. Fostering a positive environment and team relationship will help ensure better employee retention rates and a successful work environment. There are specific steps you can take to achieve better employee engagement and retention in your call center.

1. Streamline Your Hiring Process

It takes specific characteristics to thrive in a contact center environment, and your company’s hiring process should ensure that a qualified candidate meets those criteria before joining the team. There are systems in place for the recruitment, application, and interview processes that allow for full transparency of what is required for the role. This will help avoid any surprises that could lead to early turnover, improve attrition rates, and even include shadowing current employees before beginning.

2. Set Them Up For Success

Even experienced agents can become overwhelmed when starting at a new company, particularly if they lack the knowledge to work independently. Effective training can make the difference between a motivated employee and one already looking for the door. Training should not be a one-time phenomenon but a regular occurrence to ensure that the latest trends, technology, and processes are followed over time. Continuous training will keep your team motivated and reduce attrition rates and employee turnover.

3. Give Ample Feedback

One of the main reasons agents give for leaving is the lack of timely feedback regarding their performance (DMG Consulting 2022). Understanding expectations is essential to meeting and exceeding them, so exchanging feedback should be regular. Understanding how employees prefer to receive feedback and any subsequent coaching is a great way to ensure it is heard and taken into thoughtful consideration.

4. Gamify Performance and Rewards

There’s no question that we respond to monetary or symbolic rewards. Improving performance should be enjoyable, and creating a friendly competitive environment can increase employee satisfaction and improve performance simultaneously. Top performers can be recognized in many different categories so that everyone has the opportunity to feel involved.

5. Encourage Breaks

In any workspace, repetition can feel tedious and lead to discontent. Being able to vary tasks day to day, even slightly, can make a big difference. In contact centers, repeatedly hearing the same rejection to the same script can lead to a downtrodden agent. That’s why it’s so important to be able to take short breaks to shift gears and energize. Encourage your employees to bring thoughtful, mindful breaks to clear their heads before jumping back into action.

6. Invest in Technology

The future is digital, and it’s here. Whether you’re worried about attrition, agent engagement, quality management, or customer experience – the solution always involves having systems and platforms to make success as easy to achieve as possible for management and agents. Upgraded technology enables you to gather valuable data and turn it into meaningful insights to keep your employees fulfilled and fuel your company’s growth.

7. Don’t Skip the Exit Interview

Embrace good turnover when it means that your company can move forward with even better information on how to motivate agents from the very beginning. Candid feedback from an outgoing employee through an official channel can be incredibly valuable to your continued success.

Conclusion

Employee attrition is a problem for companies in every industry, and contact centers have an exceptionally high turnover rate. This can be due to the stressful work environment and the job demands. However, there are things you can do to reduce employee attrition and keep your call center running smoothly. Often, it’s not one single issue but a combination of factors that cause people to look for new opportunities. 

Having systems for hiring, training, and quality management allows for open communication between managers and agents and helps identify issues before they become problems. Are you looking for ways to improve your retention rates? Schedule a demo with our team and learn how we can help.

Key Takeaways

  • Understanding the reasons for employee attrition is the first step to reducing turnover at your company.
  • Having systems for hiring, training, and quality management to allow for open communication is essential in reducing call center employee turnover. 
  • Staying updated on new call center technology lets you gather valuable data and turn it into meaningful insights to keep your employees fulfilled.
Blonde Woman Smiling While Holding Call Headset | How-to-Migrate-Voice-Centric-Quality-Management-to-an-Omnichannel-Contact-Center-Solution | Authority Software
How to Migrate Voice-Centric Quality Management to an Omnichannel Contact Center Solution

An omnichannel contact center solution provides superior customer experience over voice-only options. Today’s customers are self-solving, communicate regularly via live chat, and expect seamless customer service when they choose to migrate an issue up to a voice call with a live agent. Voice-centric quality management can only take you part of the way to providing your customers with a fully evolved, integrated, and efficient experience.

While omnichannel contact center solutions are the way of the future, voice-centric contact centers aren’t left entirely in the dust by new wave technology. Over 44% of people surveyed in the U.S. still prefer phone or voice as their primary customer service channel. So investing in voice calls is still a viable approach, but with live chat being a close second favorite, it should not be your only approach.

AI has Improved Quality Management for Voice-Centric Contact Centers.

Speech analytics is a method of using artificial intelligence to analyze spoken language. Businesses can use this technology to help improve their quality management processes by identifying patterns and trends in customer feedback.

This type of AI can help identify areas where customers are experiencing problems. By analyzing customer feedback, businesses can pinpoint specific issues and then take steps to address them. This can result in improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Speech analytics can also be used to monitor employee performance. By analyzing recorded calls, businesses can identify employees who may need more training or coaching to improve their performance. This can help companies ensure that their employees provide the best possible service to customers. To learn more about improving your company’s CX by enhancing your quality management, download Authority Software’s Quality Management guide from DMG Consulting LLC.

What is an Omnichannel Contact Center?

An Omni-channel Contact Center Solution is a complete customer service and support solution that enables businesses to provide seamless customer experiences across all channels, including voice, chat, email, social media, and more.

With an Omni-channel Contact Center Solution, businesses can take a holistic approach to customer service, unifying all customer interactions into a single view. This allows businesses to get a complete picture of the customer journey, identify issues and pain points, and deliver consistent, personalized experiences across all channels.

Omnichannel Contact Center Solution and Quality Management

An Omni-channel Contact Center Solution should deliver powerful quality management capabilities. With this solution in place, businesses can record and review all customer interactions, identify trends and problems, and take action to improve the overall quality of the customer experience. The efficiencies of automation that come with AI for quality management greatly solidify team cohesion and communication between tiers of management. This allows the company to operate more fully as a collective entity rather than a collection of departments. Read more about how digital strategies can improve your CX. 

Resolve issues quickly and improve the overall customer experience with an omnichannel solution. Digital channels are more flexible and scalable, so you can easily add or remove seats as needed. In addition, an omnichannel approach is a primary way for your company to develop into a unified contact center solution.

Overall, an Omni-channel Contact Center Solution can help businesses provide a better customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce operating costs. This solution is ideal for businesses that want to deliver support across all channels and improve their quality management processes.

Conclusion

Migrating from solely voice-centric to an omnichannel contact center opens up a myriad of options for contact centers to increase productivity and improve customer experience. Utilizing the technology, enhanced feedback, and teamwork of a properly run and automated voice-centric solution, an even more efficient omnichannel contact center should be a breeze. 

So if you’re looking to improve your quality management process, an omnichannel contact center solution is the way to go. Schedule a demo today to discuss your options.

Key Takeaways

  • With an Omni-channel Contact Center solution, call centers can solve issues more efficiently and improve the overall customer experience. 
  • AI can be used to strengthen and deliver more targeted analytics to drive better customer experiences.
  • Speech analytics can help monitor employee performance and identify areas of improvement with additional training or coaching. 
  • Omnichannel Contact Center solutions help provide seamless customer experiences across all channels, including voice, chat, email, social media, and more.

 

 

 

Smiling Woman Holding Out Hand While Talking on Headset | Is your Unified Contact Center Solution Digital First? | Authority Software

Is Your Unified Contact Center Solution Digital-First? | Authority Software

Customers today prefer to self-solve any issue, and calling the contact center is the last option most will try. However, they expect short wait times and an efficient solution to their problem when they do. Having customer information from all available sources readily available for agents allows for a smooth experience. When a conversation can seamlessly move from chat to live agent, customer experience ratings go up. This also makes task management easier for staff. Modernizing your contact center with a unified contact center solution will offer the best customer experience, increase efficiency, and decrease costs.

What Does Digital-First Mean?

Most modern companies are entirely digitized. The thought of hard copy files and tracking systems for daily use is shudder-inducing. However, digital-first isn’t just “being online.” Digital-first is as much workplace culture as it is about the tech systems used. When companies are truly digital-first, programs are updated with the most optimized solutions available that align with company goals. The digital systems in place all collaborate and work together. This applies from daily task management to overarching company organizational systems.

When companies move towards a digital-first environment, an overhaul of company processes may be necessary to ensure all parts are cohesively working together. Take a close look at how well current software serves the overall team. A complete overhaul can be tricky as operations down to the smallest task rely on these processes. However, holding back only ends up denying the opportunities of prioritizing a digital-first workplace. For assistance recognizing when a switch is necessary, read about the signs your workforce optimization software is ready to retire

Unified contact center solutions assist by  jumpstarting company engagement with digital-first practices. Most unified contact center solutions on the market today are already digital-first. Getting the most out of your contact center doesn’t have to be challenging.

What is a unified contact center solution?

A system that consolidates all points of contact into one reference system, effectively increasing customer satisfaction. Connecting all points of contact for customers also increases productivity and ease of use for call agents. Creating a unified contact center solution reduces friction in cross-departmental processes increasing total organization efficiency. Maximizing customer service experience, directly correlated to higher levels of brand loyalty, will, in turn, produce a higher ROI.

Unified Customer Service Experience

Digital-first unified contact center solutions offer several advantages over traditional solutions. They are designed for use in a world where customers expect seamless communication with businesses through various channels, including social media, chat, and SMS. 

This means that digital-first unified contact center solutions can provide a better customer experience, as they can meet expectations more effectively. In addition, digital-first unified contact center solutions are often more scalable and easier to use than traditional solutions. 

Some of the other advantages of digital-first unified contact center solutions relate to the next generation of customers. Offering a more modernized, better customer experience, these solutions are easier to use, track, and scale. Sprinklr’s article on the use of AI in contact centers points to the ever-growing needs of next-gen customers. It states that “93% of customers expect a seamless experience from channel to channel.” Unified Contact Centers are the top way to achieve this.

Industries

Quality unified contact center solutions are in high demand, especially for high-stakes industries such as fundraising, order management, financial, healthcare, and customer Support. Authority Software provides superior digital-first unified contact center solutions for all verticals. 

These solutions enable fundraising departments to accurately record donor information with pledges and engagement information. They allow centers specializing in order management to view and manage inventories, order fulfillment, and shipping information in one seamless place. 

The Financial and Healthcare industries vastly improve their efficiencies using Authority Software’s patented redaction software fully integrated into these systems. In addition, unified contact center solutions often come with various features. These can include customer relationship management (CRM) integration and call recording.

As this CustomerThink article points out, automation software augments the work that contact center agents do rather than optimizing them out of a job. “Automation also cuts costs and drives consistency, speed, and scalability to business processes.” Quality of care within contact center solutions is essential to boosting customer satisfaction, which is directly correlated to the survival and growth of businesses.

We Can Help

Authority Software’s Unified Contact Center Solutions allow businesses to build a digital-first strategy. Through automation software and custom-built solutions, they can upgrade your contact center’s efficiency. Unified digital-first contact centers manage call intake while improving the customer experience.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about how Authority Software can help you unify and digitize your contact center!

Key Takeaways

  • Next-generation customers expect more from their interactions in the rare times they choose to interact with a live agent.
  • Unified Contact Centers seamlessly integrate customer information for efficient reference, providing a better customer experience. 
  • A Digital-first contact center uses software to connect and enhance company-wide efficiency. 
  • Authority Software’s Unified Contact Center Solutions allow contact centers to manage call volume alongside customer satisfaction, magnifying company growth, and scalability.
Cropped Image of Woman Talking on a Headset | How Digital Initiatives are Driving Innovation in Contact Center Quality Management | Authority Software

How Digital Initiatives are Driving Innovation in Contact Center Quality Management

Just as businesses have moved their operations online, the contact center industry is undergoing a digital transformation. This shift, driven by advancements in technology, makes it easier for customers to communicate with companies through various channels. One of the most important drivers of innovation in contact center quality management is the ever-growing volume of customer interactions. Contact centers now handle more calls, chats, and emails than ever before. This makes it impossible to manually review every single interaction. To keep up with this change and meet the rising expectations of customers, contact center managers turn to innovative digital initiatives for quality management improvements. 

Automated quality monitoring tools help contact centers keep pace with this growth by automatically recording and analyzing customer interactions. This enables contact centers to identify and address quality issues in near-real-time, rather than waiting for a manual review process. An automated process improves customer satisfaction, reduces operational costs, and drives continuous improvement. Quality management tools work in conjunction with other services such as workforce management to help organizations achieve excellence in customer service. Providers like Authority Software offer services designed to work cohesively together. 

Artificial Intelligence in Contact Center Quality Management

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent, businesses explore new ways to implement it into their operations. AI technology is becoming invaluable in contact center quality management, especially in supporting unified contact center solutions. Machine learning technologies help develop new quality monitoring and measurement tools, providing more accurate and actionable insights. By automating tasks like monitoring agent performance and handling customer complaints, AI technology helps ensure that your contact center delivers the best possible customer experience.

Forbes predicts that “in 2022, we’ll see an increase in adoption of AI to augment agent performance, automate quality management, and deliver more proactive care.”

AI-powered voice analytics can automatically identify and flag interactions with high emotional stress levels. Contact center managers can then take steps to address the issue. This ZDnet article references this new tech “sentiment analysis” as able to identify “changes in emotion and behavior during interactions with customers,” which points toward improving future customer experience. Machine learning can identify patterns in customer interactions that indicate a potential quality issue. By leveraging these cutting-edge technologies, contact centers can stay ahead of the curve and improve customer service quality.

Impacts on Employee Training

Digital initiatives also drive changes in the way contact centers train their agents. In the past, contact center agent training primarily focused on product knowledge and efficient call handling. However, with the increasing importance of customer experience, contact centers now emphasize training agents on delivering exceptional customer service. Contact center quality cannot be improved without first improving the quality of agent-customer interactions. Upgrade your overall customer experience within cloud-based contact centers with these tips

Impact on Traditional Monitoring

Digital initiatives also help contact centers move away from traditional quality monitoring methods, such as mystery shopping, which can be time-consuming and expensive. Instead, contact centers increasingly turn to digital tools and technologies, such as interaction analytics, providing more accurate and actionable contact center quality monitoring. Migrating to new systems can be challenging. For advice on a smooth transition read, How to Easily Integrate Unified Contact Center Solutions with Current Operations

By automating contact center processes and leveraging data and analytics, businesses can improve the overall quality of customer interactions. Digital transformation helps contact centers identify and address process weaknesses that impact quality. For example, if a contact center uses an outdated CRM system, it may be challenging to track and manage customer data effectively. As a result, contact center agents may not have access to the information they need to provide quality service. By investing in a new CRM system, the contact center can overcome this challenge and improve its overall performance. Consulting with the experts at Authority Software provides insight into potential improvements for your call center.

How do digital strategies connect with contact center quality management?

Contact centers can more effectively manage quality assurance programs by automating processes and collecting data. Digital tools can help identify training and development needs while optimizing contact center operations.

Digital strategies help contact centers track and measure customer satisfaction levels. By understanding customer sentiment, contact centers can make necessary adjustments to improve the customer experience. Digital technologies help contact centers transform the way they manage quality and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Let us help you

Looking for a contact center quality management solution? Visit Authority Software today! We offer a comprehensive suite of quality management tools that can help your contact center improve its operations and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

 

Key Takeaways

  • The increase in contact center call volume necessitates automated processes in order to provide quality customer service.
  • Customer experience is the key indicator of top brands and so is a top priority in training. Using AI and digital strategies helps assist in the training process.
  • Digital tools like interaction analytics provide more accurate and actionable contact center quality monitoring, which saves time and money.
  • Monitoring the quality of customer interaction is simplified with automated systems, allowing energy to focus on improvements and growth.
Male Nurse Smiling With Contact Center Headset On |How the Pandemic Changed Healthcare Contact Centers & Video Redaction Services | Authority Software

How the Pandemic Changed Healthcare Contact Centers & Video Redaction Services

The pandemic prompted a significant shift in how individuals sought healthcare, with surging numbers of patients utilizing modern technology to communicate with healthcare providers. As a result, healthcare contact centers have come to play a foundational role in healthcare customer service, which impacts their quality management of video redaction. 

Healthcare contact centers are critical for delivering timely and appropriate patient support, including helping patients with scheduling appointments, prescription refills, and care questions to improve the patient experience. With rising demand, contact center leaders may struggle with outdated systems that force customers to repeat information and lead to a slow and frustrating experience. 

To improve the customer experience, contact center leaders need to evaluate agent performance with stored video and audio recordings while ensuring the security of sensitive and personal information protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Healthcare contact centers need redaction services that allow them to record, access, and protect audio and video.

Why does your healthcare contact center need video redaction services?

Manually removing personal or protected information from video recordings can be time-consuming, complicated, and leaves the possibility for error. Video redaction services can automatically remove private details to comply with security regulations, ensuring security and confidentiality.

Patients’ Expectations are Increasing

As patients become more comfortable with digital healthcare communications, their expectations for those interactions rise. Patients will expect a seamless omnichannel experience across their journey, regardless of how they communicate with healthcare representatives. 

For healthcare contact centers to ensure that individuals have a positive experience across channels, contact centers must easily access patient information and history without patients having to repeatedly provide their health history or repeat the same information constantly. 

The combination of increased demand and increased customer expectations may leave contact center agents, and their leaders feeling stressed, frustrated, and overwhelmed by inhibitors to an exceptional customer experience. To pinpoint where an agent is experiencing difficulty, such as struggling with finding the correct information or dealing with a slow system, healthcare contact centers must review quality recordings for both audio and video, redacting personal information to achieve regulatory compliance. 

Doing this manually can be tedious, wasting both time and resources. Instead, healthcare contact centers need an efficient HIPAA-compliant redaction tool that can crypto shared original recordings containing sensitive audio and video. This will make it so that any personal info typed into the field on the screen wouldn’t be shown in the video when reviewed for quality purposes.

Digital Healthcare Requires Increased Data Security 

While digital healthcare communication allows for ease, and convenience for patients, they also pose a range of privacy and security concerns that healthcare contact centers must address. Removing sensitive, personal, or protected information from contact center records is a precise and complicated task. 

Healthcare contact centers must ensure that while reviewing audio and video records for quality management, patient data is protected in a manner that meets HIPAA requirements to ensure privacy. In addition, the digital nature of this medical information has also created concerns surrounding the vulnerability to hacking or other breaches of security. Through audio and video redaction, healthcare contact centers can store recordings either perpetually or for a predefined period of time without any concern that sensitive data is accessible by users.

The Need for Audio and Video Redaction

Healthcare contact centers are responsible for adequately handling protected information under HIPAA, most commonly done through redaction. Audio and video redaction remove personal or protected information from medical records. This assists healthcare contact centers with security, compliance, and data access.  

  • Security – Using 256-bit (AES) encryption for security and regulatory compliance, healthcare contact centers can prevent unauthorized users from accessing recordings and reduce the risk of fraud. 
  • Compliance – Automatically track the location of private information flagged to be removed from your final audio and video recordings to comply with security regulations, including HIPAA.
  • Data Access – Cryptoshred original recording containing sensitive audio. Store recordings either perpetually or for a predefined period of time without any concern that sensitive data is accessible by users.

Patented Redacting Capabilities Improve Security and Overall Satisfaction at Your Healthcare Contact Center

Custom workforce optimization tools from Authority Software allow you to record, access, and protect audio and video recordings for quality assurance and search easily and quickly by customer data fields. Enable your team’s effectiveness and improve retention with a modern WFO solution that supports the customer success journey. 

Learn what’s possible with AI-enabled workforce management.

Key Takeaways

  • Healthcare contact centers have come to play a foundational role in healthcare customer service. 
  • Patients expect a seamless omnichannel experience across their healthcare journey.  
  • Healthcare contact centers must ensure that while reviewing audio and video records for quality management, patient data is protected in a manner that meets HIPAA requirements.
  • Patented video redaction capabilities from Authority Software can improve security and overall satisfaction at your healthcare contact center.
Woman and Man Smiling While Looking at Report and Wearing Headsets |Give Your WFM Supervisor Tools for Success: 3 Challenges Faced by Contact Centers this Year | Authority Software

Give Your WFM Supervisor Tools for Success: 3 Challenges Faced by Contact Centers this Year

The complexities of efficiently managing a contact center, and delivering superior customer service, have become significantly more complicated recently. Contact centers face a distributed and remote workforce, a new generation of agents, and rapidly changing operational requirements and digital transformation. This makes the role of a WFM supervisor that much more challenging to overcome these changes. 

Over the past year, contact centers have seen a rapid rise in the volume of calls and the rate of difficult calls that require escalation. In fact, according to a study by Harvard Business Review, during the pandemic, difficult calls increased by an astounding 50-percent overall. At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that businesses, including contact centers, see employees leaving jobs in record numbers

As more customers use digital channels as their primary method of interacting with a company, contact centers require better Workforce Management tools than in the past. Workforce management  (WFM) tools are robust solutions that help businesses streamline contact center operations and combat common day-to-day challenges, allowing them to run more smoothly and effortlessly. Give your WFM supervisor the tools necessary to manage these current challenges with a modern, scalable, and rapidly-deployed WFM solution from Authority Software that enables superior customer service and improves agent job satisfaction.

What is the role of a WFM supervisor?

In a contact center, the Workforce Management (WFM) supervisor is responsible for planning and forecasting, managing resources and optimizing the productivity of employees. The WFM supervisors ensure the right number of agents, with the right skills, are scheduled at the right time.

Challenge #1: Distributed and Remote Workforce

The pandemic forced contact centers to shift to remote work almost overnight due to social distancing requirements. Contact center managers quickly needed to ensure that agents had the right tools and equipment to work remotely. While the pandemic was the catalyst for pushing contact centers to embrace a variety of remote and hybrid working environments, now that the switch has been made, many contact centers will allow employees to continue to work remotely

These new work environments present contact center leaders with many challenges, namely poor technology, insufficient connectivity, and difficulty with training. However, businesses are also discovering the advantages of a distributed and remote workforce. Remote operations can help make companies more resilient, prepare for the unexpected, and give them more flexibility, but only if they have the right workforce optimization tools. With Authority Software WFO, businesses can utilize a fully integrated cloud-based solution to accommodate remote workers and virtual contact centers. 

Challenge #2: A New Generation of Agents

Confident and engaged contact center agents are essential to delivering a superior customer experience. Yet, employee attribution and a remote workforce have made recruiting, hiring, and training agents another significant challenge facing contact centers this year. Workforce management tools can help contact centers build the best team of agents and improve employee retention. With easier access to more detailed data, organizations can better predict future workload volumes, calculate the time needed to accomplish specific tasks, and schedule the necessary staff. 

Monitoring tools, in particular, can be used to improve the quality of your customer support and ensure agents are following best practices. However, the ability to monitor agent performance does more than only improve adherence and consistency; it also simplifies performance reviews and makes it easier for hardworking employees to feel like their efforts are being properly recognized. Modern workforce management tools balance the needs of customers, the contact center, and employees, helping increase overall efficiency. 

Challenge #3: Rapidly Changing Operational Requirements and Digital Transformation

Customer demand is a driving force in the digital transformation of contact centers, as today’s customers expect to contact a business from any channel seamlessly. Outdated systems may cause agents to have incomplete or compromised customer data, causing frustration and hindering productivity.

Customers’ expectation of a consistent omnichannel experience has made it increasingly crucial for contact centers to have fully integrated systems, allowing agents to have everything they need in a single, unified desktop. By combining tools and services under one system, suitable contact center solutions help businesses increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. 

With Authority Software WFO, which includes WFM, quality management, and designer tools, businesses can utilize a fully integrated solution that is agile and flexible to meet the needs of their customers throughout their journey. This type of digital transformation can produce measurable benefits, providing vital data and actionable insights that drive business decisions.

This year, overcome the challenges facing contact centers with a fully integrated, cloud-based workforce optimization solution.

Designed from the ground up, custom workforce optimization tools from Authority Software increase productivity and enable superior service through improved efficiency. Modern workforce optimization software can help businesses increase productivity and profitability and lead them to success.

Learn what’s possible with AI-enabled workforce management.

Key Takeaways

  • Contact centers face a distributed and remote workforce, a new generation of agents, and rapidly changing operational requirements and digital transformation. 
  • Workforce optimization (WFO) tools are robust solutions that help WFM supervisors combat common day-to-day challenges.
  • WFO tools can help businesses increase productivity and profitability and lead them to success.
  • With Authority Software WFO, businesses can utilize a fully integrated solution that is agile and flexible to meet the needs of their customers throughout their journey.