How a Cloud Contact Center Helps Achieve Your Goals

Your business has a laundry list of goals and metrics to meet. Optimizing your workforce, maximizing employee performance, and building better customer engagement are probably a few that sound all too familiar.

If you’re ready to optimize, maximize, and exceed your goals, a cloud contact center can be just the answer you need to make success possible.

What Is a Cloud Contact Center?

A contact center is the central point from which all inbound and outbound customer communications are received and delivered. A cloud contact center is hosted on an internet server so that interactions are accessible from virtually anywhere. This is achieved using a comprehensive suite of tools, applications, and cloud-hosted services.

The benefits of using a cloud contact center over a brick-and-mortar contact center include:

• Lower upfront costs and administrative overhead
• Easily-added communication channels 
• Scalability on demand 
• The ability to meet customers’ evolved expectations
• Global carrier connectivity
• Data-rich, easily monitored metrics

Making and Meeting Process Goals, Outcome Goals, and Metrics

In order to achieve your desired outcome, you must set two types of goals and, to stay on track, meet specific metrics all along the way.

• Outcome goals correspond to a long-term vision and should ultimately bring significant results. 
• Process goals are specific actions that will get you to your desired outcome goal.
•  Metrics measure your standing with key performance indicators. 

One common problem your company may run into when setting goals is when you either set your outcome goals without naming your process goals, or vice versa. To be successful, both types of goals should be in harmony.

Another problem is the inability to track, in real-time, how your performance is in relation to your goals. That’s why using metrics all along the way can keep you on track for ultimate success.

Meeting Your Goals with a Cloud Contact Center

It may seem a bit surprising, but a cloud contact center can be a significant help in meeting metrics, hitting your process goals, and ultimately achieving your outcome goals. 

Here are some examples of how a cloud contact center can do all that. 

Outcome Goal: An Optimized Workforce with Improved Collaboration and Maximized Performance

Workforce optimization is all about lowering operational costs through proper staffing and coaching tools. Improved collaboration allows for better problem-solving in most situations. Reaching maximum performance means higher profits. Put these three things together and this is a worthy, yet bullish goal. However, it’s certainly attainable with the help of a cloud contact center.

Process Goals:

• Use an outbound campaign manager to automate calls for sales and marketing.
• Utilize embedded, on-demand voice and chat capabilities to reduce first-contact resolution time.
• Add predictive analytics-based routing to better anticipate customer needs and identify top-performing agents that deliver optimal results.
• Centralize the operational performance of agents, teams, sites, systems, and partners so that monitoring becomes easier and more accurate.  

Metrics to Follow:

• Average Speed of Answer: While there is no industry standard for what this metric should be, factors include competitor standards and customer expectations.
• Average Time in Queue: You will improve your customers’ experience if you have a low score on this metric. A score lower than 18 seconds indicates correct staffing, a high level of schedule adherence, and an excellent routing structure. 
• Average Handle Time: Calculate your AHT by totaling the Talk Time, Hold Time, and Post-Call Work Time and dividing it by the number of calls. When setting your benchmark, don’t overemphasize speed (this can compromise the quality of service). 
• Occupancy Rate: This is the percentage of time spent handling incoming customer contact rather than time spent being idle. Divide workload hours by staff hours and aim for 85-90%.

Outcome Goal: Increase Customer Service and Customer Engagement

In order to increase customer service, you must give rich contextual information to each customer interaction. This opens the door to a high level of personalized service, which is exactly what today’s customers desire and deserve.

Process Goals:

• Link and analyze the customer experience at each stage.
• Apply many of the same tips that optimize your workforce, improve collaboration, and maximize performance, because these also have a very direct and positive effect on your customers. For example, predictive routing optimizes the customer’s journey and reduces abandon rates.

Metrics to Follow:

• Average Call Abandonment Rate: If your customers don’t stay on the phone long enough to get assistance, there is a problem with connecting an agent with your customers in time. According to Industry Insider, “the average call abandonment rate for all service desks is 8.7 percent, which is slightly above the optimal range.”
• First Call Resolution: If a customer has to call back multiple times, is transferred too often, or is handed over to a supervisor when trying to get their issues resolved, then you are sacrificing service.
• Net Promoter Score: A one-question survey that uses a 0-10 scale. The question is, “How likely is it that you would recommend [your business] to a friend or colleague?” 

Outcome Goal: Unify Analytics to Better Identify Correlations and Trends

Having a complete view of your customer interactions will help you optimize efficiency, financial performance, customer experience, and business outcomes. Take control by having a unified view into all your data and you’ll gain deeper operational understanding, greater insight, and a wider perspective.

Process Goals:

• Incorporate real-time operational dashboards. These are used to monitor operations so that changes can be made at any time to maximize performance and productivity.
• Have a Customer Engagement Repository. It stitches together customer interaction and agent activity records from multiple systems and vendors for a complete, real-time view of customer engagements.
• Use a Contact Center Analyzer to segment, profile, and visualize data in the systems and identify key variables that impact productivity and your desired business outcomes.

Metrics to Follow:

• Are your performance reports scheduled and automated?
• Do you understand the data fields and formats coming from the various systems?
• Do your analytics capture, organize, and let you interactively explore and cross-analyze interactions and activities with business and financial results?
• Are you provided with objective, statistical insight into the actions, behavior, and real-world performance of agents and customers?
• Can you create new business metrics using fields and measures from multiple systems?
• Are you able to map operational efficiency measures to performance measures?
• Can you statistically pinpoint high-performing agents, successful marketing programs, and engaged customer demographics?

The Omni-Channel Approach to Unified Communications 

Unified Communications is a term used to sum up nine different types of communication that may be involved in a contact center:

1. Voice
2. Video
3. Email
4. Instant Messaging
5. Social Media
6. Mobility
7. Presence
8. Desktop Sharing
9. Directory Services

While many contact centers offer unified communications services, FirstDigital takes it much further. More than just a list of features, FirstDigital’s cloud contact center takes an omnichannel approach. This is important because it allows the use of multiple channels to interact seamlessly amongst agents, managers, back-office experts, and customers in a context-aware manner. This consistency of experience amplifies the level of service you can offer your customers, as well as ups the profitability on your end.

If you’re ready to transition to a cloud contact center for help achieving your business goals, learn more about FirstDigital!