January 9, 2018
One aspect that makes Unified Communications great for businesses is its many integrated features. Altogether, these features work to make communication easy. In this blog, I'm focusing on a single Unified Communications feature that does a lot to benefit organizations: Contact Center.
First things first, if you're new to Unified Communications, know that it's an integrated business technology solution that makes it possible to communicate seamlessly across all areas of business. I've written about the various benefits businesses experience with Unified Communications, and I've introduced a few of the most popular features as well.
Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS for short, is the full suite of Unified Communications software,
UCaaS Feature Highlight: Contact Center
The Contact Center is a solution to a problem many businesses have faced for quite some time: managing customer communications. The way customer communications are handled have a large impact on customer satisfaction.
Previously, the primary ways businesses supported their customer communications were either by:
- Patching together a makeshift PBX infrastructure extension that left them with something that's "good enough", meaning it was probably poorly integrated and resulted in negative customer experiences.
- Purchasing a separate, specialized contact center solution, which came with its own set of capital expenses, integration
issues and maintenance expenses.
Left with these two options, businesses had to choose between providing sub-par customer communication through a DIY option or paying a large capital investment for something that provided a good customer experience. Both options require plenty of internal resources, especially employee time and effort, without delivering a great experience.
How Is UCaaS Contact Center Different?
There were a few things missing in these previous models that UCaaS Contact Center addresses. They were difficult to implement, integrate, manage, maintain and scale. With UCaaS, Contact Center integrates seamlessly with existing communications. Management and maintenance are handled by Marco, and it's easy to scale your services up or down with a phone call or a few mouse clicks. Here are a few benefits of UCaaS Contact Center:
1. Dynamic Call Routing
Contact Center routes customer calls based on your organization's key performance indicators, meaning all callers can be automatically prioritized and queued based on an intelligently designed algorithm suited to your business.
2. Unified, Multi-Channel Communication with Customers
Multiple customer communication channels like email, chat, voice and social media are all unified under Contact Center. On the customer end, this eliminates having to explain their reason for calling every time they're transferred to a new member of your team.
3. Global Call Queuing
Contact Center is cloud-based, meaning calls can be received and queued regardless of geographical hurdles. Contact Center agents have access to the same features and capabilities whether they work remote, at home or in office.
4. Geo Routing Rules
This identifies an inbound caller ID or email address and routes to the appropriate team that supports that region.
5. Skills-Based Routing
A skills-based routing feature in the contact center identifies the inbound communication request and directs it to the agent with the highest skill rating in solving that client issue.
6. Call Recording
This tool records calls for quality assurance, training, compliance and grade-based effectiveness.
As you can see, Contact Center is a solution that is structured with both businesses and their customers in mind. While most businesses are quick to tell customers that their call is important, the way a call is handled is what truly shows customers how much you value them. To learn more about Contact Center and UCaaS, contact a Marco Rep.
