The service industry is experiencing exponential growth through a multitude of different services offered to customers, along with simultaneously expensive distribution channels and intense price competition. More than ever, the problem of attracting new customers is expressed. Eventually, the company’s greatest value becomes its existing customer base.
Customer retention requires an understanding of customers and their needs, and a sure tool for this is the marketing theory related to Customer Relationship Management – CRM. Within the operational part of CRM, the main point of contact for customers and companies is the contact center that ensures the necessary Quality of Experience – QoE. Customer relationship management is a strategic approach that emphasizes the importance of understanding and anticipating the full spectrum of customer behaviors and needs.
Call Center and Contact Center
Initially, CRM primarily contained Call centers, which companies developed not only for sales purposes but also for post-sales activities to provide support to users of products and services. They were primarily oriented to making calls from special facilities, which responded to their users’ inquiries about specific information, complaints, or suggestions. The growth and development of communication technologies have influenced Call centers to grow into Contact centers.
The usual definition describes a Contact center as a set of resources, such as staff or agents, computers, and telecommunications equipment, needed to enable the delivery of services via telephone lines. This definition has continuously changed with technological development, so a call by phone has grown into communication by fax and e-mail.
The modern contact center represents a single point of contact for implementing the entire external communication and the company’s business strategy related to its customers. Therefore, contact centers are workplaces where staff communicate with users through multiple communication channels such as telephone, e-mail, websites, live chat, and social network.
New advances in telecommunications technologies are revolutionizing the way customers communicate with contact centers. In this context, there is a growing interest in new products and software for customer support enabling processes and communication in contact centers. These products are usually additionally equipped with intelligent tools that enable integrated data and knowledge adapted to customer needs.
Incoming and Outgoing Calls
Although a clear development path exists from call centers to modern contact centers, the same synonym for call center, customer service, and contact center has remained in the literature and industrial environment. In any form, regarding the direction of communication, we can distinguish between the two types of modern contact centers in terms of call initiation:
- Incoming calls are most often used to provide information to callers, solve problems, and increase the quality of service, and
- Outgoing calls have the purpose of proactive communication with existing or potential clients and customers to increase sales, billing, or collecting new information.
Omnichannel approach
To fully understand the needs of users, it is not enough to establish a contact center that enables multiple access channels at the same time. To improve the customer experience in the contact center, the so-called omnichannel approach is required. The omnichannel approach implies full integration of all access channels:
- Phone
- SMS/Messaging
- Website / Web forms
- Knowledge base
- Live chat
- Social networks.
When the entire process is properly designed and implemented, a large set of customer data is available to agents, along with a wider/richer environment.
It also allows customers to be focused not on the channel, but on the goal. They can think about values and their requirements rather than access channels. Customers usually want a quick, clear response to their requests and needs, and get personalized support. Therefore, they can determine the most desirable channel for each situation in their communication.
Companies are emphasizing omnichannel approaches that include search-based self-service and the use of knowledge bases. However, a certain paradox appears that self-service often leads to an increasing number of incoming phone calls by as much as 10-15%.
Quality of Service in Contact Centers
The emergence of new technologies has affected contact centers, turning them into virtual centers with staff employed worldwide. It opens numerous opportunities for performance analysis and contact center improvement.
Customers are increasingly sophisticated and attentive to the quality of service they receive. Each individual expects accurate and contextual support in real-time, regardless of the device they are using. If these expectations are not met, it can lead to a loss of confidence in the service. However, when customer support effectively resolves issues, it fosters a positive perception of both the product and the company, ultimately enhancing customer loyalty.
The quality of service in the contact center can be improved by two complementary models:
- Qualitative or psychological, which refer to issues of how services are provided and perceived, ie. whether the customer is satisfied with the response and whether the agent is user-friendly. These models are more empirical and come from social sciences and marketing, and
- Quantitative or analytical, which are provided using common analytical techniques, such as queuing theory, text mining, and data mining models.
Eventually, all models aim to meet key performance indicators – contact center KPIs, which are further used to measure agent performance and overall productivity,