As the hub for all your customer support interactions, your contact center is crucial to executing an omnichannel customer experience (CX) strategy that allows customers to interact with your business using their preferred channels. That makes the customer contact center software solutions that power your operations critical to success.
But how do you know if your contact center software solutions provider is giving you everything you, your employees and your customers need to ensure the best experience? By establishing your overall goals, you can then take the steps necessary to determine if your current customer contact center software solutions are meeting your needs or if it's time to explore an upgrade.
Defining contact center success
Before you can measure the success of your contact center software solutions, you have to define what success looks like. Typically, the major measure of success is efficiency, which can be defined in many different ways. But you should also measure success in terms of the customer experience; it does you no good to have an efficient operation that leaves a sour taste in a customer's mouth.
One other measurement of success that sometimes gets overlooked is the employee experience. The more you can use technology to keep agents productive and engaged, the more efficient they can be and the better service they can provide.
Using KPIs to measure customer contact center software solutions
Once you've defined success, determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) you'll use to establish your current baseline and track improvement. You can track dozens of KPIs, so make sure you pick the right one(s) for the specific goal you're looking to reach.
For example, an improvement in your first call resolution would likely indicate an increase in customer satisfaction, as it means their issues are being solved the first time. However, if it takes an agent a few extra minutes to solve the issue during the first call, that could impact their efficiency or productivity rate. If that's how you're measuring success, you would instead want to track something like the average handle time instead.
To improve efficiency, it helps to track both the contact center's and individual agent's performance. This will help you make systemic changes to your operations, such as working with your customer contact center software provider to add new capabilities while also identifying opportunities to improve each agent's skills.
Evaluating the effectiveness of customer contact center software solutions
Once you define your KPIs and begin to track them, you must then determine what to do with the information. While some changes to your operations may have a direct impact on your chosen KPI, other changes may be more difficult to measure. Often, contact center operations leaders are continuously optimizing their operations across multiple initiatives, which makes it especially challenging to determine how much each optimization contributes to a change in the KPI.
At this point, it often makes sense to work with a contact center technical services provider that can provide guidance around strategy, planning, design and analysis of your contact center operations. For example, Verizon Contact Center Technical Services can provide an independent assessment of your contact center software solutions to proactively identify any issues or impacts the software may have on your KPIs.
By isolating the impact of your technology on KPIs from the impact of your workflows, training, agent experience and other factors, you can identify the specific areas where you can use advanced software offerings, such as contact center edge solutions and contact center managed services, to deliver the full potential of your contact center.
Making changes to your contact center software provider
Whether working with a consultant or evaluating your KPIs on your own, the purpose of tracking metrics is to enable data-driven decisions. With this data, you can make informed decisions about whether or not your current customer contact center software solutions are capable of meeting your needs today, not to mention your anticipated needs as you grow.
Do you need to switch providers, or is it possible to make changes while keeping the same software? If you're working with a legacy system, you may find you've outgrown your current solution. This will be evident in terms of reduced productivity, an inability to keep up with today's cyber security requirements or a lack of technology integrations that make it impossible to execute an omnichannel CX strategy. At the same time, switching your contact center software provider can be a heavy lift, so it's not a decision to take lightly.
By working with a trusted outside partner like Verizon, you can leverage a team of specialists that can evaluate your current technology infrastructure to help you identify the gaps that are holding performance back. They can then help you identify opportunities to improve operations while providing the cost-benefit analysis you need to make a decision. Should you decide to switch contact center software solutions, the Verizon team can provide the technical expertise required to implement the new solution without disruption.
Learn how Verizon Contact Center Technical Services can help you transform your operations to improve your customer experience.
The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.