Solutions for Contact Center Managers

As a contact center manager, you have one of the most challenging roles in making your organization's customer experience (CX) strategy successful.

Contact centers often set the tone for customer relationships and can strengthen customer loyalty or degrade customer retention. A customer who needs help is in a vulnerable state of mind that can amplify both positive and negative experiences. In fact, our research shows that over 40% of customers will abandon a brand after two poor customer service interactions.

In addition to providing satisfying customer service experiences, you're also responsible for enhancing operational efficiency and managing customer support teams effectively, all while adhering to a budget that is probably a little tight and perhaps getting tighter.

When juggling this many balls, you need the best contact center software to help you nail all your responsibilities and not let a single ball drop. User-friendly CX software can add simplicity to complex contact center processes and help ensure you and your teams are wildly successful.

The contact center dilemma

Do you ever feel like you can't satisfy everyone at the same time? Customers, other departments, agents, supervisors, and other operational staff all have needs and expectations, and sometimes they can seem mutually exclusive. Making life better for agents might mean blowing your budget, while sticking to your budget could result in longer wait times and less satisfied customers.

In the world of customer service, contact center managers often face the following challenges while also trying to make everyone happy:

Improving operational efficiency in customer service

If your contact center has been around a while, there's a good chance that you inherited some inefficient processes or clumsy workarounds that make you a little crazy. And don't you wish you had the time, resources, and right systems in place to eliminate them and add efficiency to your operations?

Outdated, legacy systems are common barriers to streamlined customer experience management. Here at NICE, it's not unusual for us to win new clients whose previous contact center solution couldn't give them timely management data or integrate smoothly with other applications. The results? Lots of spreadsheets and manual processes.

Agents also suffer when old systems don't support operational efficiency in customer service. If your agents have to toggle through multiple systems while helping customers or copy information from one application and paste it into another system to complete a transaction, you may need more user-friendly CX software.

Workforce management is another area that can benefit from enhanced operational efficiency. Customer service experiences can be impacted when the forecasting process is cumbersome and provides inaccurate results. And when intraday management is slow or nonexistent, large groups of customers could be negatively impacted or, conversely, you may be inefficiently overstaffed.

Managing customer support teams

Managing supervisors and teams of agents comes with its own set of unique challenges, especially if part or all of your staff work remotely.

One issue we frequently hear from prospective clients is that they don't have enough data to objectively evaluate performance or fully understand what their team is working on. In an environment that generates so much data, lack of individual performance information shouldn't be an obstacle to effectively managing a team, regardless of where employees are located.

Additionally, agents often don't have on-demand access to their performance data, which makes it difficult for them to self-manage and stay motivated.

High agent turnover

Turnover among customer service agents is among the highest in any industry, and chances are you're feeling the pain of frequently losing knowledgeable staff and continuously needing to hire and train replacements.

The onus is on contact centers to become the employer of choice by offering competitive pay and benefits, ongoing employee development, a positive culture, and the necessary tools to be effective. This last factor includes user-friendly CX software, which not only sets employees up for success, but helps you get your new agents up to speed more quickly.

Satisfying customers

Customers have always been demanding, but the internet has shifted power away from businesses and towards consumers - other product options are just a click away if customers are unhappy with the service they receive.

In addition to expecting superior service, customers want options for how they communicate with businesses. Phone support isn't enough for modern consumers. They also expect effective self-service and digital channels such as chat and email.

Providing consistently exceptional customer service experiences requires top-notch agents and the best contact center technology, and meeting customer demands for channel choice adds increased complexity to a contact center manager's already full list of job responsibilities.

All these challenges become amplified if you're using antiquated legacy systems. Old call center software can hamper your customer service operation from satisfying customers, meeting your budget, measuring performance, and becoming an employer of choice.

Let's take a look at how modern software can help you create a streamlined customer experience management process that satisfies both customers and agents without breaking the bank.

Turning challenges into opportunities

What makes industry-leading contact center platforms stand out from the rest? For starters, they're easy to learn and use.

User friendly

User-friendly CX software applications not only include intuitive user interfaces, but they allow end users to easily perform tasks such as configuring IVR menus, designing custom reports, and configuring routing rules. This eliminates the dependency on vendors or IT teams to perform those tasks, which makes contact centers more agile.

NICE CXone has all these qualities and more. Our software is easy to use, which shortens the learning curve for new employees and enhances the overall agent experience. Additionally, the design studios included in our IVR and ACD solutions let you change things like upfront messages and menu options in a matter of minutes. And if one of the multitude of out-of-the-box reports in our reporting tool doesn't quite meet your needs, you can create your own from scratch.

Create efficiency

The best systems also support efficiency. Productivity tools for customer support allow users to get more done through capabilities that include automation, artificial intelligence, and a unified agent desktop.

CXone enables contact center managers to streamline their operations so they are more efficient and accurate and allow you to do more with less. Solutions such as robotic process automation can assist agents by handling their simple, repetitive tasks. Our AI-infused workforce management software recommends the best algorithm to use based on your contact center's unique characteristics and decreases the amount of time staff members need to spend on forecasting and scheduling. And MAX, our omnichannel agent solution, consolidates agent tools into a single user interface, enables a single sign on for multiple applications, and helps multi-skilled agents keep all their work organized so nothing falls through the cracks.

Built for modern customer experience

Contact centers also benefit when their technical solutions are built for modern CX. For example, providing an AI-driven customer interaction to someone can help you boost customer satisfaction through enhanced personalization and smarter resolutions.

This is another area in which CXone excels. Our system includes over 30 channels to meet the demands of today's digital consumers. Our smart self-service solutions, designed for AI-driven customer interaction, empower customers to conveniently handle their own matters. And our omnichannel capabilities allow customers to seamlessly switch channels within the same transaction without needing to repeat information.

In the cloud

Finally, industry-leading contact center platforms are in the cloud, meaning that they're hosted by a vendor and accessed by end users through a web browser. Cloud-based solutions typically integrate easily with other systems, such as CRM software. Additionally, they can easily accommodate unplanned volume spikes. Plus, because you only pay for what you use, they can be a cheaper alternative to systems you host on-site.

CXone is a cloud-native contact center platform that comes with a multitude of pre-built integrations for easily connecting our software to your other systems. Because we host the system, we're responsible for managing hardware and software, freeing up your IT resources to focus on other priorities. A hosted solution means you're always using the latest version of the software and have access to the most current innovative features. Additionally, adding more capacity is just a phone call away, and many of our clients realize cost savings because they no longer have to purchase expensive, inflexible software licenses.

The proof is in the pudding

You don't have to take just our word for it. Our clients, both large and small, have transformed their customer service operations with CXone. Here's a quick look at a couple of success stories.

That's what a contact center team lead for an Australian financial services company had to say about their new CXone platform. Their 60 agent contact center had several goals in mind when it decided to upgrade its technology:

• Capture customer feedback and sentiment
• Improve operational resilience and flexibility
• Increase ability to manage platform in-house
• Simplify agent onboarding
• Gain flexibility to accommodate growth

Implementing CXone Interaction Channels, Quality Management, Workforce Management, and Interaction Recording allowed our client to completely transform the customer and employee experience while scaling and evolving to meet its changing customer service and operational needs.

Here's what another, larger client had to say:

The above quote is what a customer service support analyst for a major pharmaceutical company had to say about CXone. Our client, which has over 2500 agents spread across three contact centers, was facing some customer experience and efficiency issues caused by disparate IVR systems. The goals for their system selection and implementation initiative included the following:

• Streamline IVR experience
• Improve reporting process
• Remove friction between contact centers

By implementing CXone Interactive Voice Response (IVR), the business was able improve agent satisfaction and productivity and reduce technology costs through a single solution all three contact centers can use.

Would you like to see CXone in action? Watch our demo and visit our product page to see how our productivity tools for customer support can turn your contact center's challenges into opportunities.