Achieve Customer Service Excellence with Contact Centre Data

To deliver true Customer Service Excellence, every successful and unsuccessful customer interaction should be understood and visible to the business.  This means that for those adopting a customer-first ethos, the role of data from call and contact centres has a vital role to play.

However, very few, if any SMEs operate formal contact centres but that doesn’t mean that they can’t benefit massively from the data and insight a contact centre solution can provide.

In an SME business, potentially every single member of staff could be speaking to/interacting with customers, including the MD, but none of these people would ever be classified or managed like a contact centre agent.  And the opportunity to truly understand these customer interactions is potentially more vital to an SME and its customer-facing teams, than it is to a large enterprise.

The SME opportunity for resellers

SMEs are the early adopters of digital transformation services like Microsoft Office 365, Skype For Business, cloud voice etc and are heavily dependent on mobility and social media.  With less reliance on old legacy computing and communications systems, that makes these organisations highly agile and responsive.

And whilst the role of the formal contact centre is less significant, in certain market sectors such as retail and hospitality, digital transformation enhances the ‘informal contact centre’ opportunity, providing SMEs and their multiple customer-facing teams with access to the benefits of a contact centre.

Omni-channel solutions on the horizon

For SMEs that do not run a contact centre, the term omni-channel is an unfamiliar term since the management of customer interactions over multiple channels such as phone, website, social media, etc is difficult and costly.  Building and delivering a true ‘omni-channel’ solution that meets the needs of a wider market has been out of reach to 90% of the SME market.

However, cloud-based omni-channel solutions are beginning to emerge. These will undoubtedly disrupt those vendors with ‘comfy’ revenue models, who have built a niche at the high end of the contact centre market. Growth in the demand for omni-channel in the SME sector is going to explode over the next few years as the barriers to entry (cost) is removed, the customer service excellence benefits understood and Omni-Channel as a Service (OCaaS) becomes the norm.

Download our eBook “Will your Customer Journey Map bypass the Call Centre?”