Mid Market Call & Contact Centres

To deliver customer service excellence, it is imperative that organisations understand their customers and review their experience of interacting with the business.

​This means plotting the various potential customer journeys through the business, not just those that pass through the call centre.

Analytics lie at the heart of any business and remain the leading factor in a decision when considering a contact centre solution.

If the aim of customer service excellence is to resolve a customer’s query on their first call (First Contact Resolution) to maximise customer satisfaction, then an organisation cannot look at a contact centre in isolation but must understand how customers are trying to contact the business as a whole.  However, often a contact centre is reviewed separately rather than in conjunction with the rest of the business which can have serious consequences.

Tollring recently studied the contact centre of a large multiple retailer with the aim of uncovering more intelligence in their data analytics.  The pilot study revealed that the contact centre was measuring customer service levels in isolation to the rest of the business.  The system measured answered / missed calls once they were in the contact centre queue, but the metrics of calls that had been queuing to enter the contact centre silo and calls diverted to a voice message or redirected as an overflow call had not been included.  As a result, the number of missed and unreturned missed calls in the business was significantly higher than expected, clearly impacting the overall customer service strategy.

In our experience, the best reporting and analytics model for customer satisfaction is attaned through combining a multi‐site call analytics system alongside a contact centre system.  In this way, every site, group, team or individual across the business becomes in essence an “informal” contact centre or agent.  By delivering some of the features and reporting capabilities of a contact centre into customer-facing teams within the business, the customers’ entire journey can be tracked, monitored and handled correctly.

The contact centre can only measure what it sees rather than the whole customer experience. Understanding the complete customer journey is the key to improving customer service and analytics are vital in discovering where improvements can be made.

The cloud opens opportunities in reporting and analytics and removes historical localise deployment issues.  The cloud extends the way customers can interact with a business, so as organisations move towards the cloud and evolve their digital communications, it is important to ensure that measures are in place to watch over the entire ‘cradle-to-grave’ customer experience, of which the contact centre is just one element.

​Read related article published in Comms Business.