Why Your Business Needs a Blended Call Center Solution
One of the most challenging aspects of any call center environment is the way the agents utilize their time. Often, call center supervisors find themselves distributing and redistributing resources over and over to different operations and departments. These arduous tasks can significantly waste precious time better spent elsewhere and this is where blended call center solutions come into play. With efficient blended call center solutions and services, businesses can easily and strategically automate both their inbound and outbound campaigns to utilize their call center’s capacity to the maximum.
Combined with a wide range of features such as intelligent dialer function, call transfer, recording, call barge-in and utilities like agent extensions, live reporting and analytics, and support for at home agents, blended call center solutions and services allows business to not only merge both their inbound and outbound campaigns but also offers a great many opportunities to develop many business enhancing advantages like agility and efficiency, regardless of the size or scale of the call center operations.
In this article, we shall briefly discuss a few benefits and features of blended call center solutions.
1. Unprecedented Flexibility
Blended call center solutions offer businesses the holistic capability to assign agents to both inbound and outbound campaigns according to existing call traffic volume. It allows call center supervisors or admins to automatically transition agents from inbound campaigns to outbound when inbound traffic is low and the other way around as well.
These solutions automatically prioritize inbound calls over outbound campaigns when inbound call volumes are high. The whole transitional automation of blended call center solutions also provides call center supervisors with the visual representation of the flow of resources from one campaign to another and delivers crucial insight on individual agent’s performance.
2. Greater Efficiency
With blended call center solutions, efficiency, both in terms of the agents and the numerous call center operations is significantly boosted. Efficiency as such is greatly influenced due to the very features and utilities blended call solutions offers, such as intelligent dialer functions.
Apart from that, the ability to effectively route calls to qualified agents, integration with leading business tools and utilities, and better collaboration with remote workers creates opportunities for businesses to cultivate operational efficiency across the entire call center environment.
3. Increased Productivity
Due to all the efficiency promoting features and utilities of blended call center solutions mentioned in the point above, it is quite apparent that it also encourages increased productivity. Features such as automated call distribution and custom call dispositions allow businesses to create operational protocols which boost productivity, not only in terms of calls answered but also in terms of decreased wait times, and better customer experience.
With blended solutions, call center supervisors also gain access to powerful real-time reporting and management tools to further stimulate productivity.
4. Better Customer Experience
Customer experience is a crucial element of every call center environment. Blended call center solutions intend to improve customer experience and satisfaction by delivering all relevant customer data to the agents through CRM integration, allowing for swifter and more precise interactions.
These solutions also offer custom scripting and Call Whisper/Call Barge-In capabilities to businesses to help increase customer experience and satisfaction across the board by offering the callers with quick and satisfactory issue acknowledgment and resolution.
5. Improved Employee Satisfaction
With a blended call center solution, the customers are not the only ones with all the benefits. The employees as well derive great advantages, which help them to become more and more productive without increasing workload and its associated stress. It also helps agents enhance their skillset by exposing them to both inbound and outbound campaigns. This helps to keep them interested and engaged in their daily operations.
Blended call center solutions also help call center supervisors to identify mediocre agents in need of training and interaction protocols which might need optimizing to improve employee satisfaction rates. This way employees rather than feeling demotivated and discourages can be guided in a more constructive manner to help them achieve their goals and performance metrics.
It offers a comprehensive telecommunication solution which makes the agent’s work a whole lot easier by providing relevant customer information automatically, eliminating the need to manually search for them for each interaction.
6. Improved Revenue
It might not be apparent, but industry experts consider blended call center solutions or services to be the secret behind successful cross-selling and up-selling. With better customer satisfaction, blended solutions help the entire customer-agent interaction to become more effective which creates a great many opportunities for the agents to coerce the idea of purchasing additional features, value-added features, or contract renewals to the customers, inevitably aiding the revenue generation process.
7. Strategic Business Forecasting
The most crucial advantage of implementing a cloud hosted blended call center solution or service is the ability to predict or forecast demand according to part operations. This helps businesses create and implement operational strategies to counter demand and supply issues more effectively.
With the help of strategic business forecasting, the business can now explore trends, identify KPI metrics, and monitor campaign results to help refine business operations better. Apart from that, it also helps with improving individual agent performance on a more microscopic level, leading to greater operational efficiency.
With the help of blended call center solutions and services, businesses can now also strategically manage their requirements as scaling up or down according to changing business demands.
Migrating your call center operation to the cloud and implementing a blended strategy usually offers higher successful customer interaction rates, as much as an increase of 20%-50%. Basically, businesses subscribing to such solutions will experience higher service level ratings, fewer abandoned calls and lowered wait times. This leads to better customer retention rates and all other benefits mentioned above.