The contact centre shift: time for change (web gate)

This guide will give you insight and practical advice to help you build the contact centre your customers and colleagues need and want.

The contact centre shift: time for change

A guide into what contact centres, big and small, need to thrive in the hybrid-working omnichannel world.

4 big challenges that most contact centres face

and our ways to address them

The shift in customer demands

There have been two large shifts in contact centres over the last two years: the demand from customers to be seamlessly serviced across every channel – phone, email, social, chat; and the need for colleagues to be able to work from multiple locations.

Despite the expectation from customers, many businesses have struggled to embrace this shift leading to a difficult customer and colleague experience and ultimately them both walking out the door.

This guide will give you insight and practical advice to help you build the contact centre your customers and colleagues need and want. We’ll cover:

4 big challenges your contact centre is facing
Ways to address those challenges
How you can modernise and futureproof your contact centre

The 4 big challenges of today’s contact centres

There are many challenges in the modern contact centre. But we believe that there are four big ones that could be holding your business back.

On the following pages we’ll look at each one and give you some insight into how to identify issues, ways to avoid the pitfalls and what you’ll want to consider to move forwards.

Around £55 billion is lost every year on poor customer service experiences

The 4 big challenges of today's contact centres ➜

Retaining & attracting staff

Challenge #1

The Great Resignation has seen the UK undergo the highest turnover in staff over the past two years. Covid has brought two core contributors to this: the move to remote working meaning that geographical location is no longer a limiter to where you work, and the drive for people to reassess what’s important to them and look for greater flexibility in their work-life balance.

The smart companies know this, enticing the best talent with higher salaries, great benefits packages and highly flexible working practices.

The contact centre industry has felt this more than most. Traditionally seen as an inflexible, clock watching culture, staff have flocked away in search of a new lifestyle.

To succeed, contact centres now need to evolve. They need to be providing the same hybrid working approach as other businesses while ensuring that the customer experience doesn’t suffer along the way.

But how do you do that?

1 in 4 UK contact centre agents believe
they have not been adequately trained

5 easy questions to discover what your agents want

Solution #1

Today, everyone is looking to combine flexibility with job satisfaction. Some people love the office banter, some perform better at home. In a contact centre world this means having agents that can support customers from any location across a variety of channels, collaborating to answer the customers' queries.

Here are 5 questions to ask your agents today to know what they want:

Where and how do you work at your most productive?
Is it easy for you to work outside of the office?
Are your systems and devices reliable and easy to use?
Do you have easy access to the information you need to answer the customers’ queries?
Can you collaborate easily with colleagues?

If their answers suggest that they need a more flexible way of working then you should be considering a cloud-based contact centre.

Solution #1

Although it’s a big change, there are loads of benefits to modernising your contact centre for both your agents and business:

You can all fully embrace flexible working locations
Without a commute, agents are more willing to work undesirable shifts
Agents can embrace a wider set of communication skills including social, email, SMS and web chat, as well as the traditional phone
The advance of digital training and online knowledge bases allow agents to own their development
Real-time analytics, dashboards and reporting give managers a clear view of performance and the ability to react quickly in busy times
You have access to a wider national talent pool

Managing customers’ queries easily

Challenge #2

You have 30 minutes for lunch and need to call your energy provider to query your bill. After answering the automated questions you’re dispassionately told you’re 29th in the queue. As if the wait wasn’t bad enough you’re faced with rhythmless muzak to deal with.

You finally get through with five minutes to spare (phew) to a friendly voice who wants to help but can’t find the right information to understand the background to your enquiry. You can feel their frustration and they can feel yours but it doesn’t help either of you. You run out of time and your query’s unresolved. That evening, over a glass of wine, you tell friends about the awful service knowing you’re going to have to try again tomorrow.

As a customer, all we want is for someone to know about us and our services, so our queries can be answered quickly and efficiently. If you can’t provide that, then your customers will find someone who can.

Do you ever tell your friends about your poor customer experience?

Always
Sometimes
Never

Communication channels and data in one place

Challenge #2

Whether your contact centre has 4, 40 or 400 agents, it plays a vital role in your service delivery and brand reputation. So, you can’t afford anything less than exceptional in the experience it delivers, both internally and externally.

In the quest to provide timely customer responses, colleagues need access to several things:

All customer communication channels from a central place - phone, email, webchat, social, SMS, even WhatsApp
A single view of all customer interactions
Easy access to customers’ data, services and history
The ability to collaborate internally to find the answer

A lot of contact centres don’t allow for these with many designed before social communication was even a thing. What’s more, the proliferation of Microsoft Teams over the past two years has completely changed the way that colleagues, teams and businesses work and collaborate.

Solution #2

9 things every contact centre should do to make answering queries easier

Provide an integrated view of the customer and their interactions across all channels
Be accessible anywhere from any device
Have an easy-to-use interface, accessible independently or through Microsoft Teams
Be able to move customers seamlessly across channels and agents
Provide real-time stats and data across every agent, regardless of location
Enable easy integration with AI chatbots that talk in the customers’ language
Support PCI compliance to ensure customer security
Make it easy to scale agents as needed to meet demand
Collaborate with other internal systems and colleagues

An omnichannel cloud contact centre that sits seamlessly with Microsoft Teams will provide an intuitive and easy way for agents to deliver an awesome experience, every time.

Justifying Change

Challenge #3

Justifying change

Legacy contact centres haven’t aged gracefully. But for many businesses the initial outlay was so expensive and the implementation so lengthy that it’s difficult to justify change.

Customising legacy contact centres to deal with our modern-day demands is tricky – a lot of them weren’t built for social media, online chat or flexible working. And the knock-on effect is systems that can’t cope, especially over peak periods, leaving both customers and colleagues frustrated.

There’s never been a better time to create the business case for change. The fast-tracked adoption of hybrid working environments means that legacy on-premise contact centres aren’t flexible enough to support today’s workforce. Take that and combine it with consumers’ demands for personalisation, cross-media conversations and 24/7 availability and you will probably find that your legacy tech is costing your business more than the cost of change.

So, what’s the answer? Turn to the next page ➜

85% of contact centre seats are still supported by on-premise solutions

Solution #3

Cloud - a cost-effective and scalable solution

Moving to the cloud will revolutionise your contact centre while at the same time saving you money through:

New functionality to increase colleague productivity and motivation
Delivering an enhanced customer experience and loyalty
Enabling flexible working across multiple locations and devices
No capital investment
No costly maintenance or upgrades
Guaranteed reliability

For a scalable monthly cost you can respond quickly and easily to spikes in demand, adding and removing users with ease and ensuring every customer query is quickly addressed.

Solution #3

9 questions to help build the case for change

Do agents spend time switching between systems to answer customer queries?
Are you spending regularly on maintenance and upgrades?
Have you experienced lost business through system downtime?
Is it difficult to scale agents to support busy times or flex cover across queues and channels?
Are your customers getting frustrated about long wait times and query resolution?
Are colleagues struggling to work from home?
Are your ESAT and CSAT scores below target?
Do your managers need more visibility of data and reporting?
Are you unable to implement PCI compliance, omnichannel, CRM integration or AI easily?

If you answered YES to any of the above questions then you’re ready to modernise your contact centre.

Find out how to do this ➜

Forging the right supplier relationship

Challenge #4

Forging the right supplier relationship

So, you’ve found the perfect contact centre solution and, you believe, the right supplier. You have a great rapport, they’re interested in your business and the price, although a little on the pricey side, feels like value for money.

However, after implementation you’re not quite so sure - they just don’t seem as attentive any more, can be tricky to get hold of and every little ask comes with a bigger and bigger price tag. Now you’re committed to a three year relationship, you’re starting to wonder if you made the right decision.

It’s very easy to get swayed by big brand marketing and swept off your feet by slick sales conversations, but what you really need is to find the supplier that perfectly matches you as a business. Things like culture alignment, straight talking, flexibility of service and in-life experience are absolutely key to long-term success of any new system rollout.

So, in a world where all products are relatively equal, how do you differentiate between suppliers to find the one that’s perfect for you?

Solution #4

It’s all about supplier trust

What you and every business is looking for is that supplier you can trust to always do the right thing for your business. This means finding a provider that cares as much about your success as you do. It’s not easy as the perfect match for one may be a frustrating experience for another.

Look to get your right balance of the price, quality and service triangle

Price
Don’t just think about the monthly charge, consider up-front implementation costs, contract flexibility, bespoke customisation charges and any upscaling or downscaling costs.

Quality
Do you need all the bells and whistles? The best solutions are the ones that are easy to use with the features you need, not cluttered with complex functionality you don't.

Service
Always think further than the sales process into areas like timescales, onboarding, in-life changes, customisations and scalability. This is a long-term commitment so think long-term.

Solution #4

10 questions to ask every supplier that aren’t product-related:

What’s it like to work at [supplier company]?
How can we make sure that the system is set up to best support different user groups?
How will we work together through deployment?
How will you help me onboard our agents and colleagues?
How will you work with me to ensure we’re set up for customer success?
How can you support me as our business scales, either up or down?
What if I have bespoke needs, how will you help me?
How easy is it to add extra functions and integrations later? What will it cost me?
How will you work proactively with us to make sure the solution always delivers its best?
Why should I choose you?

But before you ask, have your own versions of the answers you want to hear.
And then match yourselves with the supplier that ticks the right boxes.

It’s time to move to a modern cloud contact centre

In a nutshell...

So, we've talked through the 4 big challenges we've seen in our customers and given you some tools to help work towards resolving them. Here's the same stuff in a lot fewer words!

Retaining and attracting staff

Ask agents how they work best
Make sure they’re well supported by systems, data & colleagues

Managing customer queries

Centralise data & channels
Make internal collaboration easy
Integrate systems where you can

Justifying change

Quantify lost time and costs
Value scalability & flexibility
Consider PCI, AI, MS Teams & omnichannel

Finding the right supplier

Balance price, quality & service
Seek a proactive in-life relationship
Align them to your business & culture

If any or all of those big 4 challenges resonate with you, then read on to discover why a cloud contact centre should be your next business priority.

6 benefits of a modern, cloud contact centre ➜

6 benefits of a modern, cloud contact centre

Resilient
A cloud contact centre is always on and always available, providing 99.999% uptime.

Flexible
Agents can work anywhere on any device, while managers can monitor them in real-time.

Scalable
Users can be easily added and removed to manage changing business and customer needs.

Service
Customer experience is improved through a single view of channels and interactions.

Feature-rich
New functionality and features are added regularly as continual upgrades and improvements.

Phased
Solution can be rolled out across agents and teams to suit your priorities and timescales.

A contact centre for today and tomorrow

First, get the basics right

Voice: Answer every call easily using intelligent queuing and routing functions.

Flex & scale: Make it easy to add and remove users, change greetings, messaging and groups.

Data insight: See customer demand and agent performance in real-time and react accordingly.

PCI compliance: Simplify and secure payment transactions across all communication channels.

And then make it future-proof

Unified experience: Integrate with Microsoft Teams for a single communication and collaboration experience.

Omnichannel: Seamlessly add in channels as they’re launched – social, chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp and more.

Conversational AI: Help customers find the answers to your most commonly-asked questions.

Understanding your worker styles

All colleagues
want to...

Answer and make calls easily
Manage availability
Divert calls when busy
Set call-out display
Answer calls as a team
Let callers leave a voicemail

Customer services
want to…

See team members’ statuses
Work at home the same way
Have great sound quality
Handle all communication channels from one place
Have a single view of all customer data

Team leaders
want to...

Manage calls differently across teams
Set and monitor service levels
See real-time data and reports including missed calls, agent performance, calls in queue, handling times etc.

Managers
want to…

Transfer calls to other teams
Record calls for training and regulatory purposes
Ensure PCI compliance
Make it easy for everyone to do a great job
Win a customer service award

Designing the right solution

We start where it matters – with your people. After all, it’s them who will be delivering the output and benefits you’re looking to gain from the project.

Once we know and understand the requirements of each user we can design the solution that matches their needs with your business goals – both now and for the future - so everyone wins.

1. Identify

We’ll run workshops to understand how everyone works and what's needed to deliver a great experience.

2. Analyse

We’ll consider your operational, technical, budgetary and customer requirements to ensure benefit.

3. Strategy

We’ll augment the user and technical needs with your business goals to get a 360-degree roadmap for success.

4. Propose

We’ll design to scale and rollout with minimal impact together with key deliverables and measures.

Windsor’s approach to cloud contact centre

We’ve taken advantage of 20+ years of communications experience to create a flexible comms solution that combines communications, collaboration and contact to scale for every size of business.

We make it our business to know your business, working alongside you to map your worker styles to their personal needs and design a bespoke solution that both fulfils those needs and aligns with the overarching business goals.

Talk to us if:

You’re struggling to attract and retain staff or embrace hybrid working
You have people taking calls with no clear process or structure
You struggle with visibility of colleague availability or customer demand
You want to embrace more customer communication channels
You want to modernise your comms but don’t know where to start
You’re not getting what you need from your current provider

0800 160 1111

hello@windsor-telecom.co.uk

www.windsor-telecom.co.uk

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