1. Operational Communications

For teams to work effectively, they need channels that are easy to use across a wide variety of situations and workplace conditions. While many call center agents are working from home, they miss out on in-person communication with other agents and supervisors. Communication options are often limited since much of agents’ time is spent having conversations with customers. This is where having text-based channels becomes so important, especially when trying to address customer needs in the moment.

Cloud is the best way to ensure that all agents and supervisors have a consistent set of applications across all situations – their work setting, their geography, and their device. With omnichannel communication capabilities, this applies across all channels – voice, text and video– providing a complete suite of options to communicate and collaborate effectively as a team.

Considering that very few customer interactions can be addressed solely by the call center agent, it should be clear that providing great CX needs to be a team effort, and this is something that the cloud supports very well.

2. Workflow Management

Communicating is critical for successful contact center management. Contact centers, however, are also very process-driven with complex workflows that should be seamless to customers. Effortless service is a hallmark of great CX, so call centers should think about cloud in terms of improving workflows.

Whether managing a decentralized pool of home-based call center agents, or tracking communications activity across multiple channels, most contact centers still have manual processes and siloed applications. The knowledge needed to provide a complete view of the customer and their journey is very difficult to pull together into a unified desktop, where agents have that single pane of glass to provide an effortless CX. The cloud has the scale needed to support this, regardless of how dispersed your workforce is, how many channels you’re using, or how many customers are being served.

3. Integrated Reporting

Reporting is easily overlooked in contact center management. The reality of reporting in call centers is that much of it is done manually, is incomplete, lacks integration, and is done after the fact. Successful call center management requires agility to meet today’s customer expectations, and better management tools are needed to provide the right guidance.

Think about being able to collect and process input from all team members – agents, supervisors, subject matter experts – to truly improve CX and make workflows more efficient. The automation that comes with cloud makes this possible, not just for all your workers, but for every customer service interaction. Aside from being able to produce reporting based on a complete data set instead of a random sample, you’ll also have real-time reporting capabilities.

Instead of making educated guesses about what happened last week, you’ll be able to make accurate decisions about what’s happening right now. As AI capabilities are added to reporting, you’ll have richer analytics to forecast call volumes, optimize staffing, fine-tune service levels and improve agent performance. This means cloud could excel call center management, providing a great benefit to supervisors and contact center leaders.

Conclusion

Teamwork takes many forms, and contact center management requires different capabilities than what individual call center agents or supervisors need in their roles. Even when the tools are similar, collaboration needs are more complex, especially when supporting customers in real time.

Not only must everyone have seamless access to various communications applications but contact center management requires timely reporting to fine-tune team performance and develop best practices, especially with a distributed workforce.