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The way in which customers call companies in the last decade has changed tremendously. It’s true that many people still choose to stand by traditional phone support, but they have far more options at their disposal nowadays. They can make contact via emails, live-chat widgets, or social media messaging, and all straight from their smartphones whenever they need. As a result, expectations of receiving swift service have grown too.
Companies know all about it, so they strive to be available to their customers on all those support channels. But just being available is one thing, while responding to customers quickly and effectively is another. Managing the various support channels manually or through a dozen different apps isn’t exactly fast or convenient, neither for agents nor customers. Is there a way that you can effectively assist your customers on the support channel of their choice? Yes, with an incredibly useful Omnichannel contact center solution that can bring together all of your tools and channels together into one, fully integrated platform.
Let’s look in detail at how an Omnichannel contact center solution might be helpful for your company and why we think that CloudTalk in particular is the best platform for the task of boosting your customer support.
What is an omnichannel contact center?
How many tools do you and your customer support agents use daily? Chances are that the answer is “Too many”. Schedulers, call recorders, social media tools, analytics – the list goes on. And as such tools are often not connected to one another, agents have to jump between dashboards continuously. Even worse, agents also have to manually add customer data into each of these tools and later compare that from different sources. And let’s not even mention how frustrated agents might get whenever one of their tools lags or encounters an error.
With omnichannel platforms, using so many disjointed tools and support channels isn’t necessary anymore, though. All contact channels through which you might receive a question or request are brought together in one place, turning what was once a chaotic customer support process into perfectly streamlined and orderly customer assistance.
The biggest advantage of an omnichannel contact center solution is that customers can reach out to companies in the way they prefer to and whenever they want. This helps to ensure that everyone reaching out to your support will receive a prompt response and solution to their problem, no matter what method they choose to make contact on and without having to explain their issue several times even if they switch channels.
But an omnichannel contact center solution doesn’t only connect your support channels – it can do far more than just that. It can bundle together all of the other tools used daily by your customer support team – from call management tools to CRM, analytics, and knowledge bases.
Thanks to this, agents can have all of their tools connected into one comprehensive platform with customer data updated in real-time and shared between them. Then, when agents don’t have to spend time updating tools or searching for customer data, they will have far more time for providing exceptional customer support and solving callers’ issues.
And what’s especially important during times of a global pandemic is that omnichannel contact center platforms work from the cloud, meaning they aren’t bound to office computers. Whether an agent uses their workplace desktop computer, personal laptop at home, or smartphone while stuck in a traffic jam, they can still access the same tools and assist their customers in the same way as they could from the office.
CloudTalk fits the bill here perfectly as a comprehensive platform for all companies that need to merge their support channels. Let’s check out the seven main reasons why CloudTalk works exceptionally well as an omnichannel platform for all companies regardless of their size or industry.
#1 360-degree customer view
To live up to your customers’ expectations of exceptional customer support, you need data – a lot of it. But if you have to manually gather data from several channels in order to compare it, then it’s possible that you won’t even be able to make heads or tails out of the findings.
CloudTalk can gather all customer data in real-time automatically and then combine it into a comprehensive customer profile. Through their main dashboards, agents can also set which metrics are important to them at a given moment so that they can have everything visible at a glance.
Thanks to this, regardless of which channel the customer is using, agents will have all the information they need about the caller and can offer them consistent support – even before the customer reaches the agent!
#2 IVR menu
An IVR menu is one of the most valuable tools that a customer support team can have. We all know how much callers hate being transferred from one agent to another and having to explain their issues several times. An IVR menu can decrease the need for transferring calls immeasurably by immediately routing the caller to the right person for a particular problem.
An IVR menu can also handle dozens of callers simultaneously, so even during peak hours you can count on it to seamlessly divide the callers into groups and then pass them to the correct agents or departments.
To improve your agents’ productivity and let them focus on more complex questions or problems, an IVR menu can also be set to answer simple questions or perform simple actions. For example, if a caller only wants to ask about their delivery status, there’s no need for them to reach a human agent. The IVR can immediately check the status of a delivery and inform the caller about it. That helps the caller get a quick answer to their question and reduces the workload of your agents, allowing them to spend longer helping customers with more complex issues.
#3 Smart call features like automatic callback, call recording, and easy call transfers
IVR is far from the only tool in the CloudTalk platform that makes agents’ lives easier. The automatic Callback feature is one that may sound simple but can help your agents enormously, especially during peak hours.
This feature gives callers an option to either keep waiting on hold for an available agent or leave the call but keep their place in the queue. When there’s an agent who is free to take the call, CloudTalk will automatically connect the agent to the caller. 75% of customers find the idea of a callback “highly appealing” as it saves the time (and frustration) that they would have to spend waiting in line, and they can instead continue with their daily tasks and wait for an agent to get back in touch instead.
But that’s not all CloudTalk has to offer when it comes to helping agents make the most out of their time. What other useful features does it have?
- Call Recording – all calls (that you choose) are automatically recorded and stored inside CloudTalk’s database for easy access.
- Ring Groups – whenever there is an incoming call, you can set CloudTalk to notify all agents belonging to relevant departments or groups. The first agent to respond will be connected to the caller, thus improving the support center’s average waiting time.
- Business hours – set the hours during which your team is available so that if a caller reaches you outside of them, they will hear a pre-set message instead that e.g., asks them to leave a message.
- Call masking – keeps your business or personal phone number hidden by covering it with an automatically generated phone number, which works exactly like any regular phone number except that it expires after a set period of time (typically 24 hours).
#4 Integrations with popular CRMs, help desks, and other apps for a seamless user experience
To provide a true omnichannel experience and improve your agents’ productivity, you need an omnichannel contact center solution that can be integrated with most of the tools that your agents use. And available integrations are one of the strongest points of the CloudTalk platform.
Within the app, you can find direct integrations for over 60 tools from CRMs and helpdesks to E-commerce platforms. And if that’s not enough for you, CloudTalk also supports Zapier and Integromat, allowing you to connect CloudTalk to over 3,000 apps.
#5 Intelligent dashboards to analyze your team’s performance
If you want to stay on top of your team’s work and give them accurate feedback, you need to know everything about your agents’ daily work. From how much time it takes them to answer calls to whether or not they managed to solve issues during the first contact and what was the customer’s mood like. CloudTalk gives you exactly that info, meaning all the data you might need about your agents’ performance all in one place.
Through one intuitive dashboard, you can monitor how your call center works in real-time and view a variety of data straight away. And there’s no need to feel worried about being overwhelmed with tons of unrelated information. CloudTalk’s dashboard can be easily customized to suit your needs and give you exactly the metrics that are important for you at any given moment. This allows you to make quick decisions based on the data and spot potential problems within your team.
#6 International numbers to make you go global
Answering emails or social media messages from customers all over the world isn’t the slightest problem. But what about calls?
In the past, giving customers from different countries the ability to call you directly meant huge expenses for both sides. What if you had international call numbers for a few (or more) countries on which customers could call you for free or pay only a local fee? And all of that without having to relocate your business?
With CloudTalk, you can use phone numbers from more than 140 countries. If your company operates (or plans to) in several different countries, you can quickly get a local phone number for each. When they see a familiar number, your customers are also much more likely to call you than if you provided just a typical international (and most likely costly) phone number.
#7 Call statistics, call monitoring, agent reporting, and other tools to help improve performance
Your contact center’s effectiveness depends on one crucial factor – the productivity of your agents.
The more you know about how your agents work, how long it takes them to finish a call and move on to the next one, and what they struggle with, the easier it will be for you to suggest how to improve. But it would take far too much time to ask each agent how they are doing, not to mention that you would have no real way to compare the agents. So why not ask CloudTalk to help you with keeping an eye on the productivity of your agents?
On the platform, you can find several tools to make it much easier for you to gather and compare data about your agents’ daily work. Just to name a few, you can use:
- A detailed call statistics center – from the total number of calls (including missed ones) to average call duration, speed, and waiting time, all updated in real-time.
- Call monitoring – you can listen to calls your agents are current;y on and join in if you notice they are struggling.
- Agent reporting – you can also find plenty of data related to your agents’ performance inside the call statistics center, by using which you can monitor how each agent handles calls and spot if there are any areas when they need more training.
Conclusion:
If your agents spend far too long switching between different tools or struggle with responding to customers’ requests on various channels, omnichannel contact center solutions are exactly what they need to give their customer support a boost.
CloudTalk offers many more features than just merging your support channels – it’s full of handy features that can help your agents spend less on mundane tasks and more on reaching out to your customers. So why not take CloudTalk for a test drive?
