Improving CX With Contact Center as a Service

Contact Center as a Service Is Great for the Customer Experience

In today’s digital world, world-class customer service has to provide a customer experience that reflects the way people prefer to engage with companies. Being placed on hold while waiting for the “next available representative” isn’t it. Contact center as a service (CCaaS) offers businesses exceptional customer experiences with integrated communication channels for an optimized service delivery model. In this post we delve into the benefits of utilizing CCaaS on a digital CX journey, drawing on iQor’s extensive experience as a digital business process outsourcing company that makes customers smile.

Using cloud-based software, contact center as a service handles customer interaction through an omnichannel-enabled contact center that covers all stages of the customer service journey. This contact center solution replaces outdated call centers with digital technology that provides personalization and automation for customer inquiries, voice calls, interactive responses, intelligent virtual agents, social media, chat, email, texting, and speech analytics. 

The contact center as a service model allows brands to partner with a BPO like iQor to handle all aspects of customer service through a cloud-based contact center infrastructure.

Instead of every contact being siloed by department or agent, CCaaS delivers a complete overview of customer behavior, including all interactions a customer has had with a company and the communication channels they’ve used. This information enables contact center agents to provide personalized, up-to-date support that quickly resolves customer concerns and builds customer loyalty. 

Contact center as a service also improves workforce job satisfaction. Seamlessly combining options for live interactions with customer service representatives as well as automated self-service increases agent productivity and reduces redundant and mundane work. Contact center technology puts the power of digital and traditional communication channels into the hands of customer service agents.

The Benefits of Contact Center as a Service

Companies that want to experience digital customer experience success by efficiently providing the best customer service experience will benefit from contact center as a service. The advantages of using this service model include the following. 

Better Customer Experience

A cloud-based contact center gives customers more options. Whether they choose to call in by voice or use digital channels—such as social media, text messaging, email, or live chat—customers can access support in the way that’s most convenient for them. Customer satisfaction is the top priority for most companies. Using a cloud solution to provide accurate, real-time customer support can help achieve that. 

Reduced Cost and Increased Efficiency

Outsourcing customer experience management to a cloud-based contact center reduces the number of resources devoted to customer support delivery. With CCaaS, companies pay only for what they need without the overhead associated with maintaining an on-site customer service center. CCaaS eliminates the costs associated with physical buildings, hardware, and energy, as well as HR and IT support because the BPO providing the service handles all the infrastructure details. Additionally, it prevents companies from investing in a system with a lot of features they won’t use just to access the ones they need. 

Moreover, contact center software provides flexibility for customer service employees to work remotely and collaboratively while simultaneously ensuring endpoint security and data compliance measures are in place. All of the tools agents need to provide excellent customer service are available in one place. They can easily share files and see previous customer interactions. This all-in-one cloud solution boosts the efficiency of the entire team. Since CCaaS provides automated tools for many tasks, it also cuts down on the work agents must do, freeing them up to focus on more important tasks that delight customers. 

Actionable Insights

The CCaaS solution not only produces a more memorable customer experience but also provides important data to analyze and inform actionable insights. These business intelligence insights can drive the business strategy. If the same issue crops up repeatedly, it can be addressed at the source. Furthermore, contact center technology delivers metrics to track and improve productivity and agent responsiveness. 

It also offers insight into customers’ preferred channels for customer service. If, for example, most customers interact with customer service agents through social media, brands can devote more resources to an effective social media monitoring strategy. Additionally, using CCaaS technology to track hold times can improve workforce management and inform staffing needs to save money and improve CSAT metrics. 

Differences Between Call Centers and Contact Centers and Why They Matter

Call centers and contact centers are both centralized locations for providing customer support. A traditional call center does this primarily through agents handling telephone calls, while a contact center empowers customer service representatives to use a variety of digital channels for connecting with customers, such as texting, social media, live chat, email, and voice calls. 

It’s easy to think of contact centers as just call centers that use more channels, but there are more substantial differences that separate the two. A call center will typically accept an inbound call from a customer who is contacting them to answer a question or solve a problem. Even when call centers provide more channels for customer communication, they’re still primarily addressing an issue in an isolated manner. 

In contrast, contact centers provide customer satisfaction at all stages of the customer journey. Customers expect a fast response and a personalized experience when dealing with businesses whose products and services they consume, and contact centers provide that using omnichannel enhanced tools. 

Another big difference between contact centers and call centers is that contact centers provide analytical metrics to track and evaluate different aspects of the customer journey. This data is essential for driving the customer service strategy as well as influencing the broader business strategy.

Because of the focus on the entire customer journey as well as providing actionable insights, contact centers are a more holistic approach to customer experience than call centers. 

Best Practices for Harnessing Contact Center as a Service

One of the biggest challenges when switching to a contact center as a service model is figuring out how to integrate it into existing systems. The most important step in finding a solution is to determine short-, medium-, and long-term needs. This list of the top four priorities helps to get the most out of this model. 

1.   Focus on Customer Experience First

Toprovide the best possible customer experience, a contact center as a service provider like iQor should offer services and tools such as social media monitoring to improve service levels based on customer feedback. These tools allow brands to go beyond just putting out fires to proactively create a great customer experience throughout their journey with your brand. 

2.   Take Advantage of Automation 

Since efficiency is one of the biggest benefits of contact center as a service, a CCaaS provider like iQor can integrate tools that support contact center automation. These tools help increase operational efficiency, agent productivity, and quality assurance. Interactive voice response systems that capture customers’ numbers on incoming calls and call back when an agent is available are a great example. By eliminating hold times, customer satisfaction rates can greatly improve. 

3.   Implement Workforce Optimization 

Quality monitoring and performance management metrics let agents and supervisors quickly improve their performance. Based on these metrics, quality management procedures can be implemented to generate quick gains in customer satisfaction as well as employee happiness. Cloud-enabled contact centers can further reduce customer service inefficiencies by using performance dashboards to track agent productivity. 

4.   Provide Effective Agent Training

The customer experience journey will only be as good as the customer service agents. CCaaS technologies can provide targeted training based on known topics that need attention. This training can be delivered through a combination of in-person and online courses leveraging neuro-based learning methods. 

CCaaS Elevates Your Brand Experience

Contact center as a service brings big data insights and advantages to businesses of every size.

The scalable nature of CCaaS means that the solution can grow with the business without consuming additional resources. It simplifies experiences for customer service employees and for customers interacting with the brand. CCaaS offers a streamlined, cost-effective approach to a customer service model tailored to the needs of a brand to ensure rewarding customer experiences in a digital CX environment.

Experience the Best in CX

iQor’s contact center as a service model channels iQor’s digital ecosystem of customer service solutions to produce targeted improvements for the employee, customer, and client.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.

• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.

• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.

• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.

• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.

• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.

• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Richard Temple is senior vice president of IT Transformation at iQor.