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Commerce requires people to communicate with each other. A contact center keeps everybody talking – especially customers, salespeople, and support staff.
Without a contact center, customer communications are disorganized and inefficient. With a contact center, messaging is centralized and optimized, making sales and support more productive and your customer interactions more pleasing.
A contact center acts as a hub to manage sales-and-service messaging.
Why would you need a contact center for your business? Think about it: Your salespeople use phones to land deals and turn prospects into customers. Customers send emails or texts because they want more of what you’re selling.
If you get sales and service messaging right, you win more revenue and expand your market share. But what if you get it wrong? Salespeople miss great deals, and customers air their complaints to everybody they know. Nobody wants that.
Not every business needs a contact center right now. Let’s say you have a one-person shop with a half-dozen sales or service communication tasks a day. You can manage that easily with a phone, a computer, and an email account, right?
But what if it’s a year later, and your business has five people and 60 of these messaging tasks every day? Sales and service calls start getting complicated and distracting people from their work. Some customers get miffed and bug you several times to get their point across.
This is when it’s time to start thinking about investing in a formal sales-and-service messaging hub to keep everything organized and all your people on track. If you do it right, you can deliver the kind of service that keeps customers coming to you instead of bolting to the competition.
Building a contact center used to be a daunting prospect. A few years ago, you would’ve needed office space, specialized hardware, and advanced technical skills. But with the rise of mobile computing and cloud technologies, you can have all the functions of a contact center in a smartphone app, tablet, or laptop computer.
Thus, anybody with an internet-connected device can use a contact center. And businesses of almost any size can use high-powered service and sales tools previously reserved for corporate giants.
Before we dig too deep into the nuts and bolts of contact centers, let’s clarify two essential terms.
In casual business conversations, you might hear “call center” and “contact center” interchangeably. But sometimes, it helps to be more precise:
Some sales-and-service operations use only phone banks, while others use only text or video. You could have a large contact center and a small call center (or vice versa).
The key is finding the best fit for you, your staff, and your customers. In principle, a contact center is more comprehensive, taking voice calls and everything else. But if your business depends pretty much entirely on voice calls, then a call center could be all you need.
Another critical distinction is between two business communication technologies hosted in the cloud: UCaaS vs. CCaaS.
In short, UCaaS is a digital-collaboration platform, while CCaaS is a sales and support messaging platform.
A contact center's operations fall into three buckets: staffing, channels, and data analysis.
Let’s look at how agents and managers make a contact center work.
An agent’s primary functions include:
Managers orchestrate all aspects of a contact center, including:
It’s critical to understand the differences between analog and digital sales-and-support messaging.
Choosing contact center technologies wisely can help agents and managers excel in all these areas.
Every interaction between companies and customers generates valuable data. Analytics programs can help you understand what’s going right and wrong in your sales and support operations.
How does this help? Consider these sample data points:
The more sophisticated analytics apps use natural-language processing, a form of artificial intelligence, to help you understand what motivates customers who contact you. This kind of sentiment analysis can help you make better product and service decisions.
Moreover, collecting data over an extended period can produce predictive insights to help you forecast customer behavior and anticipate their needs.
A small sales and support operation might centralize everything in one location. But larger companies often have two serving distinct purposes: inbound and outbound contact centers.
Agents handle incoming messages, and managers oversee them. For instance, managers create custom message flows to ensure that agents respond to digital texts and voice calls quickly and efficiently and wait times stay as short as possible.
When messages arrive, agents respond with scripts that help them figure out why the customer is contacting them. If message routing is properly configured, calls on specific topics go to expert agents to ensure customers get what they want.
Analytics software tracks all interactions and scans conversations to improve quality control.
Direct sales and market research teams lean heavily on outbound contact centers. Here, sales teams call prospects from lists of leads to find hot prospects, and hopefully, close sales.
Market analysts conduct outbound surveys to find out what’s on the minds of their target markets. Political campaign teams and product marketers use outbound contact centers to determine which messaging resonates best with audiences.
Outbound contact centers often use auto-dialing systems to target expansive lists of potential contacts.
Setting up a contact center requires careful decisions in four areas:
Missteps at the beginning of your contact center journey can bedevil your operations for months or years. Choose wisely.
Start with the basics. What’s working? What’s broken? Where will a contact center drive the most value for your business? Make sure you pull everybody into the process from the beginning. Get feedback from managers, salespeople, and your support team.
Spell out problems and opportunities. Make a list of your top sales and support messaging challenges. Are contacts mostly inbound or outbound? Do people make voice calls or send emails? What distracts your salespeople from landing sales or encouraging your customers to recommend you to friends and colleagues?
Prioritize challenges to be solved. Which issues belong at the front of the line, and which are less pressing? How do you stack up against your competitors? Think about immediate needs and what’s likely to crop up in a few years.
Document resources and gaps. List what you have and what you need in three areas:
You’ll need a formal strategy for your contact center implementation, which should have three parts:
Your contact center may use some of the most advanced messaging technology on the market. You’ll need technology partners to run this tech at peak performance. Vendors typically work with technology specialists called system integrators to implement contact centers.
Look for vendors that have experience in your industry. Check online reviews and ask for recommendations in online forums and user groups. Ask about their support policies and uptime guarantees.
Your partners should help you finalize your contact center implementation. They should have training materials and online demos to help streamline your transition. Finally, they should have a program for support and maintenance after the sale.
A large company with a sophisticated contact center typically has two kinds of infrastructure: physical (office space, desks, wiring) and technological (computers, networks, software).
With advances in cloud-based contact center services, smaller companies might not need dedicated physical infrastructure. But they’ll definitely need technology infrastructure, which comes in three varieties:
Decisions on cloud computing technologies boil down to renting vs. owning. You either have capital expenses to buy and maintain hardware and software or operating expenses to rent hardware and software from somebody else (or both with hybrid infrastructure).
When you rent cloud services, your provider keeps all the hardware and software secure and up to date – taking a huge volume of technical issues off your plate. However, you also pay for all the digital data your cloud provider manages.
This means the more data and bandwidth you consume, the bigger your cloud bill gets. Some companies are so vast that it’s cheaper to buy and maintain their technologies than to rent them from cloud vendors.
Cloud services typically work best in smaller companies that need to scale up (and down) quickly and avoid paying for technologies they aren’t using.
Contact centers are best for product support, direct sales, and market research. Here’s how this might work in a few sample businesses.
Let’s say you own an independent insurance agency selling policies to local small business owners. You have a half-dozen staffers and a customer base dealing with complex risk management issues.
A contact center gives you tools to monitor, measure, and assess your communications with customers. Data insights can tell you where you’re winning and losing in areas such as:
Direct sales contact centers can be both inbound and outbound. Let’s say you’re a B2B distributor of components for heavy machinery like tractors or dump trucks. Your primary customers are repair shops and their technicians. Contact center technology might help you with:
Your political consulting firm is orchestrating a campaign to get a candidate elected to the U.S. Congress. Your contact center manages inbound and outbound messaging.
The contact center platform analyzes all messaging – analog and digital – for patterns that reveal voters’ preferences and motivations. It also helps identify key phrases and words that trigger specific reactions. This helps you hone your messaging to highlight the candidate’s positives and downplay the negatives.
Automating everyday communication chores makes a contact center much more efficient because machines can do repetitive jobs better than people. With automation, you can:
A voice interface lets spoken words control a machine. Contact centers often use voice interface tools called interactive voice response (IVR) to handle inbound calls. These are the automated voices that calmly walk us through telephone support processes.
A chatbot is a small application that mimics a human agent in websites and mobile apps.
Contact center software can use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to analyze customer motivations, optimize message traffic flow, and predict likely outcomes based on previous behaviors.
Let’s review the business case for implementing and managing a contact center.
A contact center can help you streamline everyday sales and service messaging. If you choose your contact center technology carefully and manage it strategically, you can boost productivity while keeping pace with customers’ ever-changing preferences.
Learn how you can use predictive analytics to forecast and make future decisions based on historical data and better address customers' changing needs.
Manage digital interactions across multiple communication platforms with contact center software.
Tom Mangan is a B2B technology marketing writer based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and is a freelance writer at GoTo. He worked as a newspaper editor in Silicon Valley for 10 years before switching to technology marketing writing in 2012.
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