The contact center guide

Contact centers play a crucial role in customer service and engagement. Employed by many different industries, they handle customer communications with the goal of enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.

In this guide we will look at what contact centers do, the technologies needed to support multichannel customer service, the impact of AI and how to ensure the wellbeing of agents when customer expectations are high.

Contents

• What is a contact center?
• What does a contact center do?
• Types of contact centers
• What job roles are there in a contact center?
• Tools and technology
• How AI is transforming the contact center
• Contact center case studies
• The future of the contact center

What is a contact center?

A contact center is a department within an organization that is specifically designed to manage and handle customer communications.

They are integral to maintaining positive customer experiences, managing customer relationships, and addressing issues promptly.

While the term is sometimes used interchangeably with “call center”, there is a difference – while call centers typically rely on telephone communication to interact with customers, contact centers use multiple channels including emails, live chat, social media, and sometimes even video calls.

What does a contact center do?

One of the primary functions of a contact center is to provide customer support such as addressing inquiries, resolving issues, and offering assistance with products or services.

Customers are increasingly expecting an omnichannel approach to customer support, so it is vital for contact centers to adapt and update their systems and infrastructure so they can support seamless communication across different channels. For example, a customer may initiate a query via email but want to follow it up via a phone call or live chat. Information regarding this query needs to be stored and easily retrieved by the agent (more on the systems that enable this further down).

Many contact centers are able to scale their operations based on demand, so they can handle larger call volumes when necessary. Consider Amazon Connect for example, a cloud-based platform operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables businesses to automatically scale resources in response to changing demand, such during busy shopping periods or peak hours.

Most contact centers also have quality assurance programs in place to maintain and improve the quality of customer interactions. This can involve call monitoring and providing feedback and ongoing training to staff.

Types of contact centers

Depending on an organization's size, industry, geographic reach, and the specific needs of its customer base, there are many types of contact center.

Here are the main types:

• Inbound: These handle incoming customer inquiries and support requests. Examples include help desks and customer service hotlines.
• Outbound: Staff at these contact centers conduct sales, marketing and surveys; for example telemarketing companies and departments doing customer satisfaction surveys.
• Blended: Many companies have a mixture of inbound and outbound services. Larger organizations may have a helpline as well as a sales and marketing team conducing outbound calls.
• Virtual: At a virtual contact center, agents work remotely rather than in a centralized location. These can be hosted on cloud-based platforms, allowing for scalable and flexible operations. These are sometimes called Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).
• Offshore: These are located in a different country to the company’s headquarters, often at a considerable distance with the goal of reducing labor costs. Nearshore contact centers, on the other hand, are in a nearby country or region to benefit from lower costs as well as proximity.

Some companies also choose to outsource their contact center to a third party organization, called a business processing outsourcer (BPO).

What job roles are there in a contact center?

The specific job titles vary depending on the industry, but here are some of the most typical roles:

• Agent: Also known as customer service representatives. They are on the frontline of interacting with customers to address queries, resolve issues and provide information about products or services.
• Team leader: The team leader is responsible for managing a team of agents, providing support and ensuring staff meet performance targets.
• Contact center manager: The manager is responsible for overseeing the work of the team leaders, addressing human resources issues and driving the overall strategy of the department.
• Quality analyst: The person in this role monitors the quality of customer interactions. They review recorded calls, evaluate written communication, and provide feedback to ensure that agents adhere to company policies and deliver a high level of service.
• Trainer: Trainers design and deliver training programs for both new and existing agents, ensuring they have the skills needed to perform their roles effectively.

Read more about typical roles for CX managers here.

Customer service skills in the contact center

Contact center agents require a combination of technical, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills to address customer queries. These include:

• Effective communication: Exceptional communication skills are extremely important for agents, who should be able to convey information clearly, listen to customers’ needs carefully and respond in a helpful and professional manner.
• Emotional intelligence: Understand customers’ emotions is also key to help resolve their problems.
• Resilience: Global events of the last few years have led to emotions running high, and dealing with frustrated or irate customers can take its toll on the mental health of agents. Staff handling customer queries and complaints need to be resilient to deal with these effectively and without it negatively impacting their wellbeing.
• Problem-solving skills: The ability to problem-solve is crucial for acting on customer feedback. Successful customer service professionals can analyze customer issues, think critically and provide prompt and effective solutions.

Prioritizing the wellbeing of agents

Contact center agents are often on the frontline of their organization. This means that they can face dissatisfied customers, high call volumes and pressure to meet targets, all of which can contribute to employee burnout.

Managers must ensure they prioritize the wellbeing of their agents. This involves recognizing the challenges they face and implementing strategies to mitigate stress. Providing regular training, support, and opportunities for skill development can empower agents to handle situations effectively.

Additionally, fostering a positive work culture, recognizing achievements, and offering mental health resources contribute to a healthier workplace.

Dr Nicola J. Millard, principal innovation partner at British Telecom (BT) explains: “We're starting to see fewer phone calls, but longer and more complex and emotive calls. That places an enormous amount of pressure on the agents.

“I think the dilemma from the employee engagement (EX) perspective is how do we make sure that those agents have got the support they need, the training and the knowledge, not just on the factual side, but do they have the emotional support they need as well.”

Watch Dr Millard and Claire Hill, customer operations director at Travel Counsellors, discuss how to improve the employee experience in contact centers and other customer-facing departments.

Tools and technology

Different types of technology and software help with workforce management, call routing and analytics. Here are some of the most common software applications and well-known solutions providers:

• Workforce management system: This helps schedule agents and manage their performance. Increasingly these are powered by AI, such as Talkdesk Workforce Management which uses automation to make scheduling decisions, reducing admin work for team leaders.
• Automatic call distributor (ACD): This allows agents to manage large call volumes by analyzing incoming calls and distributing them among agents based on different parameters. NICE has a solution called CXone that is cloud-based and scalable.
• Email response management system: Collects and analyzes customer inquiries received over email and then routes those inquiries to the appropriate agent. SAP has a solution that can filter inbound emails and even analyze their content, storing the data for decision-making later.
• Interactive voice response system (IVR): This automated system enables customers to get information from pre-recorded voice messages without requiring human assistance. RingCentral's cloud-based IVRs remove the need for hardware and specialists to install it.
• Chatbots and virtual assistants: These can provide immediate responses to customer enquiries, answering frequently asked questions and even scheduling appointments. Generative AI enables chatbots to produce text-based responses in natural language.

How AI is transforming the contact center

There are many ways artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in the contact center. 

As mentioned above, AI is already helping to ease agents’ workload through the use of AI-powered chatbots. These can respond to the simplest queries, freeing up time for the agents to handle more complex issues.

Behind the scenes, generative AI is being used to identify areas for improvement in interactions between customers and agents. US-based Fifth Third Bank is using Enlighten AI, software created by NICE that helps it understand customer intent. The tool has helped the bank discover that around 100,000 calls a month come from customers who need assistance logging in to their online accounts, leading to an update to the login information on its website, and as a result, a decrease in call volume.

Devon Mychal, senior director of product marketing for Talkdesk, says that generative AI is radically changing the way contact centers operate: “Large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT are a hot topic right now and they are going to change how a lot of the underlying technologies we use in contact centers work, making them much more effective.”

Watch Gayathri Krishnamurthy, AVP of product marketing at RingCentral and Melanie Mingas, editor-in-chief at CX Network, talk through how AI can improve contact center agent productivity and transform customer experience. 

Read about more ways AI is transforming the contact center here. 

Contact center case studies

Leveraging customer insights: The Very Group

Mark Billingham, group customer care and CX director at The Very Group, explains that listening to their customers was the basis of the retail company’s contact center strategy.

According to Billingham, The Very Group started aims to understand the reasons customers contact the retailer, “to ensure we have the best possible chance of understanding how to fix the most important issues first for our customers”.

The Very Group leverages data from various sources including text analytics, voice analytics, agent feedback, chatbot scripts, NPS surveys and in-person customer feedback.

“All CX transformations should start on solid foundations, and for that you have to remove waste, you have to fix the processes that are broken within your contact center and remove unnecessary friction for customers,” he remarks.

Within three years, The Very Group was handling 15 million fewer calls annually, thanks to process fixes, first contact resolution improvement, AI integration and self-service channels. The business’ chatbot is now so integral to customer service that it is handling 250,000 customer queries a month.

Automatic responses: Sharp Electronics Indonesia

As with many businesses, electronics multinational Sharp experienced a dramatic increase in contact center demand during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sharp Electronics Indonesia chose automation as the solution, with the aim of improving speed of consumer care and service, increasing customer satisfaction and improving accuracy and efficiency.

Sharp Electronics Indonesia receives an average of 1,000 customer enquiries per day. The volume of calls used to require 33 hours to input manual information, however following the integration of automation tools, this has been reduced by 40 percent to 20 hours. In addition, overall productivity has gone up by 60 percent.

According to Arie A Noya, customer service planning and technical center manager at Sharp Electronics Indonesia, “customers are enjoying better satisfaction and service, which also results in better sales performance”.

The future of the contact center

The pandemic was a tough period for contact centers, with staff having to work remotely and many home setups proving inadequate for handling large call volumes. Dr Millard notes that while customers were initially understanding, expectations have now returned to pre-pandemic levels.

The key to meeting this demand and delivering quality CX is through innovation and the use of new technologies, Millard says. “There are also new technologies, for example, proactive service that can push some of the demand out of the contact center, and such solutions will come into their own over the coming years and decades.

“We could see augmented reality for remote diagnostics and, pushing further out into the future, customer experience delivery in the metaverse using photorealistic avatars,” Millard concludes.