Imagine an athlete running in a marathon wearing shoes that don’t fit him. What will the result be? What will be the feeling of that athlete? The athlete may complete the race but with a lot of difficulty. It is far from comfortable or efficient. Forget the idea of winning the race. That’s how contact centers feel when their tools don’t work seamlessly.
Imagine another scenario where every agent juggles multiple platforms and switches between various screens to get customer information and every supervisor struggles to get insights into the agents ‘performance. What will be the final result of this scenario? Your every customer will be left stuck in a frustrating loop of not getting a proper solution to their issue. It is a sign that systems and tools are not connecting seamlessly.
Here enters the game changer, i.e., the power of 100+ integrations that can play an important role in unifying the tools and creating a more innovative way to work. With more than 100 integrations, you can connect your analytics, CRM, and even social platforms, allowing these tools to transform your contact center into a powerhouse of operational and agent efficiency and customer satisfaction.
In this blog, we will explore how 100+ integrations can empower your agents and revolutionize your contact center’s operations. Before that, let’s discuss the meaning of the power of 100+ integrations for contact centers.
The Power of 100+ Integrations for Contact Center: Here’s What It Means?
When we talk about 100+ integrations, it means we are talking about the third-party applications, tools, and platforms that contact centers need to integrate with their existing systems. These can be done through CTI connectors, agent desktops, and some other integration channels. These integrations are designed to provide a unified workspace for agents to get all the relevant information about customers without switching to multiple screens.
Also, these integrations assist supervisors in getting the agents’ details and tracking their performance. With the insights supervisors get from the data, contact centers can improve their agent performance and achieve customer satisfaction.
These integrations typically include the following.
Content Relationship Management tools are required to integrate to access customer data instantly, personalize services based on customer history, and log interactions automatically. Examples of these tools include Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, etc.
Workforce management systems include names such as NICE, Verint, etc. These are integrated to assist in effectively scheduling agents and monitoring performance.
Similarly, integrating communication channels such as WhatsApp, Twitter, SMS platforms, Email providers, etc, allows for omnichannel communication. It enables agents to communicate with customers on their preferred channels.
Integrating helpdesk and ticketing systems such as ServiceNow, Freshdesk, etc., allow contact centers to log and track the customers’ problems easily. With this, businesses can handle customers’ issues efficiently.
When contact centers leverage these tools and integrate them within their systems, it helps them create a seamless workflow where every tool complements another and improves operational efficiency.
How do the 100+ Integrations Transform Contact Center Operations?
In today’s competitive landscape, it is a must for contact centers to modernize their processes and operations. This is the only way to meet the customers’ expectations and improve its profits. When discussing modernizing the organization’s operations, you need to invest in upgrading tools to make them more efficient so they can handle the workflow seamlessly. To make operations seamless, integrating the tools and systems within the business plays a crucial role in centralizing and improving operations, improving agent productivity and customer experience, and bringing many more benefits.
Centralized & Improved operations
Business operations are all about keeping efficiency high and costs low. But, achieving this is not an easy goal. With the ever-advancing digital age, customers are no longer limited to only one channel to reach their contact center. They can get your organization through several interaction channels. For example, your customer may reach out to you for a simple problem through an email. They may use an SMS for further follow-up. Also, they may contact you by phone for more details about their situation.
Simply put, your customers will reach you in a way that is convenient for them. The story doesn’t end here. However, people expect quicker service and faster response from agents. Thankfully, even a small contact center has access to high tech and can integrate its applications with third-party apps to quickly respond to customers and improve agents’ efficiency.
When contact centers try to centralize their operations by bringing all systems and tools into one platform, agents and supervisors can manage everything from a single interface. This reduces the time they need to switch between multiple applications, minimizes errors, and saves time.
Improved Agent Productivity
According to a report published by Zendesk Customer Experience Trends, almost 72% of customers expect to get a fast response to their issues from agents. Agent productivity can directly impact the customers’ satisfaction levels. If your agents can offer context-based support and resolution to your customers after understanding their issues, it is sure that your customers will be happy.
Agents face some common challenges that hamper their productivity. For example, agents waste too much time navigating fields, records, and buttons to access customers’ information and send resolutions.
Sometimes, agents repeatedly copy-paste email signatures, internal notes, or some other type of messaging content that they often use. Such repetitive work wastes a lot of time, and agents do not have enough time to concentrate on their customers’ issues.
Now, what is the solution to get rid of such issues? You cannot fulfill your Customers’ expectations if your agents are equipped with the latest tools and technologies. Now, you can’t purchase every new and the latest technology and tools to improve your business operations and agent productivity. However, you can integrate your existing tools, such as CRM, analytics tools, etc, with the latest tech stack through integration channels such as CTI, agent desktop, etc. The easiest way to equip your agents with such tools is to integrate various tools and systems within your operations. It can centralize the operations.
For example, integrating your CRM through CTI or agent desktop can help your agents provide faster resolutions. Here’s how
⊚ Instant access to customer data with Screen pop-ups: The CTI system fetches the relevant customer data from your CRM and displays it on the agent’s desktop through screen pop-up features whenever a customer starts a chat or calls. The relevant customer data may include purchase records, past complaints or open tickets, or interaction history.
⊚ Automated call logging & workflow: When the CTI system syncs with your CRM, it automatically logs call details, including interaction summaries, call duration, and customer sentiment, when you enable sentiment analysis. After the call completes, the system triggers Workflow, which includes updating customer profiles, creating a ticket for unresolved problems, and sending follow-up emails. Using the click-to-dial feature, agents can directly call from the CRM.
Enhanced Customer Experience
Integration of call center applications such as CRM, telephony systems, and other essential tools allows agents to go through the customers’ information and understand their customers’ unique journeys. These integrations provide agents with sufficient customer data that helps agents to understand their customers’ needs and serve them with minimal effort.
Here’s how it helps
⊚ Unified customer view: When your contact centers connect its CRM, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Zendesk, or others, it creates a unified view of customer details. With the help of these integrations, you can bring together data from various platforms such as social media, marketing, telephony, and even ticketing systems.
Such integrations allow agents to see customer history, past interactions, and preferences from all connected systems in real-time. Whether the customer interacts through chat, email, or phone, the agents can access synchronized information from all platforms and channels.
When your agents have access to marketing data, past issues, and product usage stats, they can understand the customers’ needs appropriately and can provide proactive solutions.
Let’s understand it with an example. Suppose one of your customers submits an issue through your website form and follows up on chat. Finally, he decides to get the details through chat. With such 100+ integrations, your agents can view the original query, all follow-up interactions, and even relevant product details from various touchpoints in a single screen.
Real-Time Insights to Enhance Coaching & Agent Support
Supervisors are responsible for maintaining service quality and supporting agents. It helps them ensure smooth operations in your contact center. When your different applications running alongside your operations are integrated, it takes your supervisors’ ability to look into the agents’ performance. Supervisors can get access to real-time data from various connected systems and use them to improve agents’ performance.
Here’s how it helps
Allowing integrations through all your collaboration tools, analytics systems, CTI platforms, and telephony systems will enable your supervisors to monitor live calls and assist agents using whisper, coaching, and barge-in.
Such integrations provide your team with sufficient data from multiple channels, allowing supervisors to analyze teams’ performance, channels, and queues.
With systems like CTI, telephony, CRM, and workforce management tools integrated, supervisors can monitor key performance indicators, including first call resolution, average handle time, queue wait times, and agent occupancy rates from a single dashboard. Supervisors don’t need to toggle between multiple screens and systems; supervisors get a comprehensive view of all metrics in one place, enabling them to identify improvement areas.
Scalability & Flexibility
As the business grows, its needs also evolve. The same applies to contact centers. To meet the industry’s and customers’ changing needs, contact centers need to remain agile. The power of 100+ integrations helps contact centers remain flexible and scalable. With this, such institutions can add new tools or upgrade their existing ones without disrupting workflows.
Here’s how it works
Customizable solutions for different business needs: When businesses allow for such integrations, its flexibility helps them to tailor their system and operations according to specific customer needs.
⊚ Effortless integrations to meet growing demand: When call volumes increase, data requirements, and customer interactions, the contact center needs to upgrade its tools to handle the load and operations faster. The power of 100+ integrations helps improve the operations without compatibility issues.
For example, you have a startup, and you are scaling its operations globally. While expanding the operations, you have integrated an advanced AI sentiment tool with its existing CRM and CTI systems. The expanded functionality helps agents understand customers’ emotions even during high call volumes and address them accordingly and quickly.
Omnichannel Connectivity without Complexity
Customers want hassle-free service across different interaction channels. It includes voice, social media, email, SMS, and more. When you use CTI connectors to agent desktop to integrate these channels into your CRM or other existing channels, it doesn’t disrupt your existing system and provides your agents a unified view of customer interactions across all touchpoints.
Wrapping Up
Overall, the beauty of these powerful integrations lies in making business operations simple, efficient, and smooth. Integrating 100+ tools may sound challenging from a technological perspective, but it’s not so. Once you complete the integration, you will provide your agents with the freedom to focus on customer interactions instead of juggling between multiple screens. Your supervisors will be empowered to look into the agent’s performance and make them more efficient using the data.
Moreover, it will bring great comfort to your customers, who will get immediate resolutions to their issues without waiting hours. This will win their trust in your businesses. So, why wait to achieve this? These integrations require technological expertise, which you can get by working with NovelVox experts.
