It is critical to understand the evolution of call centers to appreciate the rapidly evolving modern contact centers.
Modern call centers are well-equipped with the latest technology and equipment. They can easily handle all incoming and outgoing calls, from an automated raspberry Pi SIP phone to a SIP conference phone.
Businesses that don’t prioritize their call center solutions can fall behind as customer demands rise in tandem with technological advancements.
Before we get into the omnichannel and AI-driven contact center, it’s important to understand why call centers exist in the first place.
Why Call Centers Exist?
A SIP conference phone is also used in call centers
Customer complaints have been around for a long time. They’ve only become worse as new communication channels have emerged. The key purpose of a contact center is to enable real-time voice communication to resolve issues.
Contact Center vs. Call Center
Contact Vs Call Center
Businesses use Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) technology to screen incoming calls and assign them to agents. In the 1980s, the beginning of 0800 toll-free lines made contact centers even more accessible.
In the 1990s, the internet and social media channels arrived. This offered new client connection channels via websites, emails, and social media platforms. With the surge of client requests through the various channels, the term “contact center” was created to provide additional possibilities for customers to engage businesses.
Meeting customer expectations while keeping up with technology improvements led to the evolution of call centers into omnichannel contact centers.
The Expansion of Call Centers That Influenced Customer Service
Omnichannel vs. Limited Communication Channels
Omnichannel
During the call center period, customers could not contact brands on their preferred channels. Instead, they had to wait in long lines to have their phone calls and emails returned.
Customers had other ways to contact brands. This was possible due to the shift to Omnichannel communication. Customers can also get rapid responses to certain questions using bots outside of office hours.
From On-Premise to Cloud-Based Contact Centers
On-site to cloud
A cloud-based contact center allows for speedy agent scalability. This helps in managing a rise in customer demand. It also enables quick and simple connections with third-party applications like CRM, ERP, and various other apps like SIP VoIP softphone.
These connectors are built-in into a complete cloud solution, making customer service delivery easier and improving customer experience.
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) to Skill-based Routing
ACD to Skill-based routing
Skills-based routing ensures that incoming calls are routed to a qualified and efficient customer service agent. This way, a caller is assigned to the best-fit employee based on expertise. It results in a tailored contact center customer experience.
From Office to Remote Agents
Remote agents
The introduction of cloud contact center technology like sip VoIP softphone and SIP conference phone has resulted in remote agents and increased contact center capacity.
Before, call center agents were operated largely from an office. This came at a cost regarding rent, crowded locations, and noisy conditions.
Nowadays, most agents are working remotely. They have access to cloud communication platforms along with SIP VoIP softphone apps. This helps meet the workforce needs of specialty businesses and improve customer experience.
Customer Journey Tracking
Track Customer joruney
Since traditional call centers lacked consumer interactions across service touchpoints, they couldn’t track customer journeys. That’s not the case with modern call centers. Contact centers can better understand users’ needs by analyzing interactions across several channels and give a better request resolution experience.
Reactive vs. Proactive
Reactive vs proactive
Traditional call center agents didn’t have this luxury because they had to read a lot of information about a product. In most cases, customers had to call back to address concerns.
Contact center agents are more proactive and efficient in responding to client demands using technologies. When a customer calls your company, Dialogflow (Google’s natural language understanding platform) takes over by analyzing transcribed language for customer intent and matching it to the best-fit response for your agent to say or do.
Conclusion
Previously, customer satisfaction was determined by how quickly an agent answered the phone instead of getting issues resolved. As a result, agents took a hurried approach to process requests, frequently leaving customers disappointed.
With indicators like first-contact resolution, chat rating, average handle time, and so on, this has altered in modern contact centers. Businesses can now monitor how best agent consumers are being served and iterate proactively to fulfill their needs.
You’ll need to implement a contact center operations strategy to not only survive but thrive. That is where Aavaz FreePBX can help with tailored contact solutions including SIP VoIP softphone. So visit the website today!
