10 Signs You Should Invest in a Contact Center

When it comes to handling your customer contacts, are you Old School?  
Or worse, are you a New School operation working with an Old School system?

It’s tempting to keep your old systems in place until they die. However, this could be costly for your business. There are many advantages to deploying an affordable new Contact Center, but knowing when to switch can be tricky. Here are 10 signs that it’s time:

1. You want to create a personal connection with customers
Neil Patel shared that connecting with your customers makes them as much as 300% more likely to buy from and recommend your business. We all want amazing word of mouth from our customers. If your customers are starting to feel distant, you need to harness today’s technology and exploit every possible media type and channel available to you.

2. Your staff often works remotely
Home working and client visits can mean your staff is difficult to reach. This doesn’t help your reputation when a client calls and the person they need to speak to is unavailable. With a new contact center solution, calls are forwarded automatically to mobile devices.
Remote and home-based agents, employees, and supervisors can use contact center applications just as if they were in the office.

3. Your call volume has increased 
Growth is a good thing. More caller inquiries can lead to more sales, but you need to keep pace with those calls. A lot of callers who have trouble getting through never call back. Not only will upgrading to a new contact center solution allow you to add more phones easily, it can allow you to dynamically reconfigure your services to best serve the current call load…on or off site.

4. You’re tired of helping just one person at a time
Just like the phone, email and support tickets are answered one-at-a-time. If plugging away at each individual case isn’t for you, it might be a sign you should invest in multi-channel Contact Center solution including chat and text. Instead of death by a thousand cuts you’ll be able to chat with multiple website visitors at once.

5. You need more Media Channels and better integration
As your customers adopt new modes of communications, your company needs to add their preferred channels and you must integrate them across several platforms – voice, email, fax, SMS, chat, Facebook, Twitter.  Enable customers to view contact center performance by available media type so customers can make intelligent decisions about which channel will serve them best. Enable APIs that integrate with CRM, WFM and other apps –  Integrated UC&C, Fault tracking systems, Case management, Video conference, Web engagement.

6. You want to create an awesome buying experience
Are there multiple steps to purchasing products from your website? Are you missing out on sales because of abandoned shopping carts? A new Contact Center solution can help you improve the purchase process on your website. Customer service before the sale is may be even more important than after the sale. Knowing in Real Time that a customer may be having difficulty and creating an Outbound Service event will create an awesome experience.

7. You’re Adding a Location or Moving Locations
If your business is opening a second location, implementing a traditional phone system may not be the best choice. A single new Contact Center Solution, based on IP Services, serving multiple sites is cheaper than implementing a single traditional call center now, and paying for an IP upgrade within several years. Additionally, if your business has aggressive growth targets over the next few years, an immediate IP based solution is probably most cost-effective. IP can scale seamlessly across multiple users, while continually paying to install new telephone lines can be much more expensive.

8. You Need More Features and Integration
As your customers adopt new modes of communications, your company needs to add new features to keep up with their preferred channels and you now must integrate them across several platforms. The need to embrace all communication channels including voice, email, fax, SMS, chat, Facebook, Twitter and the ability for all channels can be handed off to subject matter experts, respond to emails in the most effective way, use Web Chat to reduce expensive phone calls. To enable customers to view contact center performance by available media type so customers can make intelligent decisions about which channel will serve them best. Open APIs that integrates with CRM, WFM and other business applications, Integrated UC&C, Fault tracking systems, Case management, Video conference, Web engagement.

9. You get the majority of your business from your website…
If your website drives the majority of your revenue, why not take advantage of every opportunity to improve it? That’s what we thought. A new Contact Center solution will enable businesses to serve customers in the media of their choice: voice, email, Web-chat, SMS, social media also supports multimedia self-service, so you can collect information from customer chats and emails before routing them to a live agent.

10. You want to leverage your investment in other business systems
Have you invested in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Force Automation (SFA), a Help Desk or Knowledge Management System like Salesforce.com? How about communications and office tools like Skype for Business, Office 365, or Social Media monitoring applications like Trackur, and BizVu Social, so your business can monitor and proactively respond to social media posts?
 

Today’s Contact Center Solutions will fully integrate in both North and South bound integration that will give users the ability to use business communications capabilities directly within these application’s native User Interface, providing quick, convenient access to inbound, outbound and in-call features – efficiently and with minimal distraction.

Learn more about how new Contact Center technology can transform your customers’ experience with your business.

Contact TCI today at (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.