A customised contact centre: the efficient solution for better CX!

The continuous improvement of the customer experience (CX) is what many organisations strive for. A smart contact centre solution is indispensable for this, but certainly not the ultimate or only solution. After all, a great customer experience is not created in the contact centre alone. It takes an entire organisation to make that happen.

Purchasing a standalone contact centre platform – no matter how smart – is therefore not a turnkey solution for improving the customer experience or business results.

After all, what good is a smart system if it does not provide access to customer data that is located in countless other systems within the organisation? If it doesn’t match the complexity of the organisation off the shelf? In that case, some customisation will be needed to ensure that the chosen contact centre solution exactly matches the wishes, needs and business processes of your organisation.

Greater efficiency thanks to seamless integration

‘Ready-made’ contact centre solutions usually do not automatically connect to systems that employees work with on a daily basis, such as the CRM software, billing package, support tickets or booking system. As a result, employees are forced to access different systems, usually while talking to the customer. This takes time, is prone to errors and causes frustration. Moreover, it does not provide customer contact employees with a complete picture of the customer, and reports are fragmented.

One of the key prerequisites for the success of any contact centre solution is the seamless integration with all these backend systems. To ensure that data is synchronised in real-time across all applications, and employees have access to a 360-degree customer view, so they can serve the customer 100% efficiently. This has a huge impact on the customer and employee experience, and saves time and costs.

User interface

The user interface is another area that can be enormously improved by means of customisation. It is a well-known fact that staff churn in contact centres is high, and that the cost of training new employees is huge. A user-friendly interface makes a big difference here. It not only speeds up the onboarding process, but is also a lot more convenient for employees.

A single integrated interface that displays all applications the agent works with, and omits all the bells and whistles that are irrelevant. After all, these are likely to only cause confusion and ambiguity.

A custom user interface and screen pop result in increased agent productivity, as all relevant information and telephony functionality is immediately available, without having to manually switch between different screens.

From complex to super-easy

Many contact centres deal with complex processes, and they all have access to vast amounts of data. Especially in larger organisations, the routing strategies tend to be complicated, and ready-made reports and dashboards don’t usually provide sufficient detail.

The ideal contact centre solution is one that can be fully adapted to the needs and complexity of the organisation, so all channels flow seamlessly into one other to provide full insight into all relevant data at all times. This is the only way to make adjustments when necessary, and thus optimise the customer experience.

Unfortunately, a common complaint in contact centres is that changes cannot be implemented by the business and that there is too much dependence on the IT team. Completely understandable, but the fact is that there are really only two types of contact centre solutions: on the one hand, complex solutions that can really only be customised by developers, and on the other hand, solutions that score high in terms of user-friendliness, but are not customisable.

The trick is to make the right translation from the complexity 'behind the scenes' that you simply cannot escape in a diverse contact centre, to the simplicity of a user interface with which the business can implement changes independently. This is much more efficient! Our customer case about a Belgian telecom provider is a good example of this.

Data security

Also when it comes to data security, customisation is often requested. Not only as a consequence of laws and regulations, but also due to the increasing media attention for data breaches. Organisations are all too aware that a privacy violation or security breach can have enormous consequences. Not just financially – e.g. paying ransom fees, or the costs associated with downtime, data loss and system recovery – but also with regard to the company's reputation and its customers’ trust. According to a study¹⁾, 70% of consumers would no longer do business with a company if it fell victim to a data breach.

As a result, organisations increasingly have additional data security requirements when it comes to selecting a contact centre solution. This usually means architectural changes, or an additional piece of data encryption. This kind of customisation ensures that customer and company data is kept extra secure, and that international data security standards are met.

^{1) VansonBourne (commissioned by Gemalto) – Data Breaches and Customer Loyalty Report 2018}

In-house or outsourced?

But customisation is not always a given. The possibilities are usually limited, especially when it comes to public cloud solutions. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases, significant steps can be taken to improve contact centre efficiency as well as the customer experience.

Many organisations have an in-house IT team responsible for managing the contact centre platform. Nevertheless, outsourcing the development of customised solutions to an external party seems to be increasingly popular. That makes perfect sense, as it requires the kind of knowledge, skills and experience that you really only keep up through repetition. Lots of repetition! While building and customising a contact centre platform tends to be daily business for a specialised party, this is simply not the case for the vast majority of in-house IT teams. So it pays to outsource this type of work.

Have you also encountered shortcomings in your organisation’s current or future contact centre platform? Do you wonder what the customisation options would be to increase usability and efficiency, and improve the customer experience? Let us know! Our experts have years of experience and are happy to help.

Whitepaper ‘From the pit lane to pole position’

The customer experience has become the competitive tool of choice, and in a world where customer behaviour and customer needs are changing at breakneck speed, the need for innovative technologies and automation in the contact centre is increasing. Those who do not invest in innovation run into an unbridgeable deficit.

In our whitepaper ‘From the pit lane to pole position: The urgency of customer-centric innovation in the contact centre’, we discuss the different ways AI and other technologies can be applied in contact centres. They help to find the right balance between man and machine, and between scalability and ‘personal touch’, in order to optimally serve the customer.

Don't get stuck in the pit lane, invest now in the technology that puts your company in pole position. We are happy to help you on your way.