Customers expect their interactions with a businesses’ call and contact centre to be seamless regardless of whether it’s a large multinational or a mid-sized or smaller enterprise.
Outside of the big traditional contact centre operations, a key opportunity for the channel is in the mid-market and smaller businesses.
Many of these organisations have been forced by the pandemic to move from on-premise to cloud-based call handling solutions and resellers now have an opportunity to penetrate this surge of new customers.
These businesses operate with informal contact centres spread across their operations such as the after-sales and support teams and the accounts department, all of which have regular and direct communication with customers. Critically, they need to ensure all these customer facing teams can communicate effectively with the outside world via the phone regardless of where anyone is working.
By adding third party analytics to monitor both incoming and outgoing calls, resellers can give businesses access to valuable information about how they communicate with their customers at a cost-effective price point as well as drive considerable improvements in their customer service.
Changing contact centres
Supervisors live and die by their analytics, they know the dashboards and how to manage their staff. With everything now in the cloud, the supervisor and agent dashboard experience can be delivered via a web browser, with the ability to work from any location. The move to the cloud has also enabled smaller businesses to punch above their weight. They can now access the features and capabilities that were previously only available to bigger companies.
The workforce changes over the past two years also means those businesses that only recruited locally in the past, can now have access to a much wider talent pool and can employ staff from any location, with the analytics and call recording capabilities to assist them in training and keeping staff on track.
Going forward, those businesses that managed in-person contact centres are likely to want to return to an office setting. However, businesses will need to offer flexible working arrangements to attract and retain the best employees.
Selecting partners
As an analytics vendor, we work with many of the major MSPs in the UK and Europe. We are seeing they are now adding analytics to ensure customer facing teams can operate more effectively. Incorporating third-party developed products into core services not only speeds up and boosts go-to-market offerings, it can also deliver a competitive advantage in a saturated market.
Selecting the right vendor is more important than ever before, especially as it is becoming much more difficult to swap out a vendor down the line. In the world of cloud voice and unified communications (UC), partnerships can be for life if chosen thoughtfully.
This feature appeared in our February 2022 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.