While contact center integration capabilities are offered by top contact center vendors today, it can still be a process that is intricate and daunting. With so many variables involved, contact center integration can be a hit or a miss. While a successful contact center integration can help transform the way your business interacts with customers, a failed integration can result in errors, bottlenecks and silos.
Small businesses are more susceptible to the risk factors involved with contact center integration, as limited budgets, manpower and other resources can put pressure on teams for getting it right the first time. Conversely, much also lies at stake when a strong CX strategy is absent in smaller businesses - thereby building a stronger argument for contact center integration.
Additionally, many small businesses only run a small customer service team that functions as a call center. Here, agents only depend on voice calls to reach customers, and resolve queries. This is the difference between a contact center vs call center; the former offers omnichannel communication, while the latter only serves traditional voice calls. As a result, contact center integration for small businesses is a valuable undertaking, as it offers the potential to interact with customers in any communication channel they prefer.
A contact center integration also opens up the opportunity for small business owners to establish a Unified Communications (UC) system that also connects interdepartmental applications such as CRM, ERP and Business Intelligence. Therefore, a contact center integration can be a great starting point for small businesses to finally adopt a customer service system that is dynamic yet scalable.
Contact Center Integration for Small Business - Why Does it Matter?
With the benefits of e contact center software being common knowledge among many, understanding how they positively impact small businesses is key so that leaders can make the right contact center integration choices. For one, a contact center can be a pathway towards improving customer service operations that go beyond solving basic support tickets and having agents clock in a stipulated amount of call time everyday.
With a contact center integration, businesses will now have the means to build a unique customer experience that is based on data-driven strategies. Agents will also be equipped with all the tools they need within a single, unified console to interact with customers across any communication channel or social network.
To take small business operations a step further, a CRM and contact center integration can enable both sales and service teams to approach customers with relevant contextual insight, well ahead in advance. Data derived from contact center intelligence can contribute to this purpose, as sentiment analysis from text messages or behavior patterns from past inquiries can shed light on how customers truly feel about your brand or a certain product.
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The Link Between Contact Center Integration and Customer Experience
A contact center integration is a crucial component towards building stellar customer experience, without a doubt. While reporting and analytics from contact center data can contribute towards adopting the most important qualities of customer service in your small business, a contact center integration can also enhance the very same by contributing to workforce optimization strategies.
One way that this is done is by using contact center call recording software, which monitors agent calls to determine quality, duration and overall performance. A contact center integration of this caliber can empower managers to coach agents based on the results obtained, thereby improving customer satisfaction and engagement rates by honing agent skills accordingly.
To further advance workforce optimization strategies in your small business, performing a contact center integration with HR software can close gaps between regular employee performance evaluations and overall employee retention. This way, even small business HR teams can benefit from a contact center integration, as relevant performance data can help HR professionals identify patterns pertaining to agent competency rates, and understand retention numbers better.
Another means of improving customer experience is by doing a contact center integration with a CRM for small and mid-sized businesses. Sales teams are now bound to directly benefit here, as data obtained from the contact center integration can be fed into the customer and task management modules they use. In turn, this data can function as contextual insights to nurture leads and perceptively interact with customers.
With a contact center integration being essential for building any form of customer experience solution, small businesses can reap benefits that aren’t only confined to handling customers better, but also improve agent productivity and conversion rates for HR and sales teams respectively.
How to Do a Contact Center Integration for Small Business
Performing a contact center integration for small businesses depends on a number of factors - most of which revolve around constraints such as tight deadlines and limited budgets. However, before a contact center integration can take place, it is imperative to build a contact center strategy that can direct the entire process, as the first step. From this point onwards, your business teams will have a clear idea on what to expect following a contact center integration, along with the possible learning curves involved for getting accustomed to a new system.
It is important to determine the scalability quotient of existing interdepartmental applications in your small business, in order to ensure an error-free and smooth contact center integration with said applications. For example, an ERP and contact center integration could cause problems with the ERP, especially if data migration has been improperly executed. A contact center integration with an existing CRM pipeline may also encounter similar issues, due to poor data migration.
With so many constraints being juggled by small businesses, addressing these factors can make all the difference between a good contact center integration, and a bad one. While a contact center software comparison can also offer insight on which vendors offer the best contact center integration capabilities, building your own case with an assessment that is attuned to the needs of your small business can enable your team to implement the best customer experience hub, amid limited resources and constraints.
