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As the main or only point of contact with many customers, contact centre performance fundamentally drives the business bottom line.

So how do you make sure yours is working as effectively as it can? MaxContact’s Product Owner, Sean McIver – who has worked on the contact centre front line – says it’s a mix of engaged agents and technology that helps teams to work smarter.

Here are his top tips for all contact centre leaders:

Your team

The importance of good agents can hardly be overstressed. During Covid, their worth became even more apparent, with agents in some sectors taking on frontline worker status. That hasn’t gone away and isn’t likely to long after the pandemic ends. Your customers are more accustomed than ever to judging organisations on the quality and efficiency of their customer service interactions. All efforts at contact centre performance management should start with your agents.

Give agents the skills they need

As agents have become more important, their knowledge of your products and services – and their ability to interact with customers in an empathetic way – is a huge differentiator for your business. Remember that customers will share a negative interaction far more readily than a positive one.

So continuous training strategies are crucial. Technical skills are essential but focus on softer skills too. How do you talk to an angry customer? How do you empathise with someone in distress? Give your agents the human skills they need to turn customers into ambassadors for your brand.

Consider their mind-set and wellbeing

The pandemic caused a shift in awareness relating to mental health. Workforce wellbeing is seen as a crucial part of business success. Internal empathy translates down the line to your frontline agents, so wellbeing should be part of any contact centre performance management strategy.

Engaging with staff, and making sure they’re doing the right things for their health and wellness, makes a world of difference.

Recognise and reward

Skilling up your team has the added advantage of showing employees that you care about their careers, and are keen for them to progress. Settled teams with low churn levels are more productive because they know your organisation and its products and services inside out. Retaining an experienced employee is always more economical and productive than recruiting an inexperienced one.

The better your call centre environment, the better your customer service. Incentives and rewards for good work are an essential part of call centre performance management. But don’t make it all about hitting targets. An employee who solved a customer’s complex problem deserves recognition, even if it gnawed away at the time they could spend on other calls.

My advice would be to ensure that you’re carefully considering the targets you’re setting for your agents. For example, you could find that if you focus on reducing average handling times, you could impact the quality of the service your team is providing. Be mindful that one target can introduce other behaviours that you need to look out for and understand.

Finally, it’s essential to look at productivity at an operational level and understand the actual business value (reputation, CSAT and financial) of first call resolution versus metrics like average handling time.

Be curious

Alongside rewards, giving feedback to your teams is crucial for call centre efficiency. According to PwC, nearly 60% of survey respondents said they’d like feedback daily or weekly. That number increased to 72% for employees under age 30. More than 75% of employees across roles believe feedback is valuable, and 69% say they would work harder if their efforts were acknowledged. Good agents want to know what they’re doing well and how they can be better, and they want recognition for going the extra mile.

Feedback is more important than ever right now, when remote or hybrid workers might be feeling isolated and out of the loop. Check-in with them often, and with empathy.

With MaxContact, it’s possible to talk directly to your agents while they are on the phone to customers. Ensure your managers are watching the wallboards and helping out your teams with live coaching and monitoring where they can. The sooner the feedback, the more impactful it is. Productive feedback can help the agent feel more supported too.

But you shouldn’t just look to give feedback. Ask for it, too.

Your teams are speaking to customers all day, every day and have to follow the process your business dictates. Feedback from agents on both customer sentiment and how easy or hard it is to do their job using the systems they have is truly invaluable. As an example, if you have a self-serve option in your IVR but your agents are still fielding these requests, ask why. Perhaps there is a common failure point. Dynamic trial-and-error is one of the cornerstones of ongoing success.

Don’t assume your teams are proactively avoiding work if a stat doesn’t make sense. Understand it first and course-correct, whether that’s the process, messaging, feedback into product and propositions or even looking at investing in better software. Whatever it is, you need to keep as close with your agents as possible.

Your technology

When your technology helps good agents work more efficiently, you have the perfect recipe for an effective contact centre. Your technical solution is the middle ground between your customers and your staff, so it has to be robust and flexible.

Integrate and simplify

Perhaps most importantly, your contact centre software needs to simplify your agents’ lives, not complicate them. Agents flipping between tabs and tools to find customer information or answer queries is a recipe for errors, unhappy clients and increased call handling times. Integration is the answer. Use software that pulls data from numerous sources (CRM, billing systems, etc.) into one simplified platform. I firmly believe that agents need a ‘single source of truth’ – one place where they can get data and, ideally, input data as well.

Agents armed with easy access to all relevant customer information will deliver more ‘one call’ solutions, the holy grail of contact centre management. Effective scripting can ensure that your agents lead the customer on the most effective journey throughout the conversation, while reinforcing a sense of expertise from the agent, because they have the information they need in the moment at their fingertips – fewer ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and unnecessarily placing the customer on hold to check things.

Intelligent routing will help here. Your software should help callers get to the right people first time, so feature-rich IVR (Intelligent Voice Response) is crucial. IVR also allows 24/7 operation for many routine requests and services – the average customer doesn’t want to speak to an agent, they simply want the ability to self-serve. Balancing this with ensuring that customers can still talk to someone if they need to is critical – we’ve all experienced the frustration of endless IVR options! Within MaxContact, customers’ ability to self-serve through payment IVRs, checking balances and setting reminders, and getting out of hours voice messages, are all examples of giving customers both choice and control.

One MaxContact customer who introduced our intelligent automated IVR saw a 22% reduction in call handling times and a 36% reduction in calls requiring agent involvement. Good IVR gives your agents more time to create memorable customer experiences and solve more complex customer issues.

Predict and succeed

There are lots of other ways in which good technology improves call centre efficiency. Predictive algorithms optimise outbound dialling. Omnichannel communications cut down on call times, impress customers, and permit the serving of multiple customers in parallel. Real-time analytics and sophisticated reporting help managers ensure contact centre teams work productively, which is especially important when agents work remotely. Technology is evolving at a breakneck speed within the contact centre industry, with mechanisms such as speech analytics and automation becoming the norm.

Another highly effective feature of high-end solutions like MaxContact is predictive workforce management. Our unique algorithm sifts all interactions with your contact centre and uses statistical analysis to ensure you have the right staff with the right skills in place for optimum, cost-effective cover.

We could go on, but the message is clear. In 2022 and beyond, the highest performing contact centres will be those where remote and office-based staff are valued and rewarded, and where technology is optimised to give your agents the tools and time they need to create better, more satisfying customer experiences.

Get in touch to find out how MaxContact can help you with this.

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Are we at the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? As far as Covid-19 is concerned, nobody seems entirely sure. The vaccination rollout promises an eventual release from lockdown, but scientists remain cagey about when everyday life might properly resume.

In the meantime, many of your sales and customer service staff are getting used to working from home. They may be there for a while yet, at least until a combination of the vaccine rollout and better summer weather allows for a cautious return to the office.

Even then, not every business will be forcing staff back into work full time. Social distancing rules are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future, limiting the number of employees in the same space at the same time.

There’s also growing speculation that many companies will never return to pre-Covid work practices, and that some form of flexible working will become standard practice. A recent Call Centre Helper poll showed that just 7% of contact centres planned to return to the office as normal², and ONS reported a 47% increase in demand for home working amongst call centre staff¹. The data’s there to see,  hybrid working, where employees spend some of the week in the office and some working from home, will become far more widespread once the pandemic ends.

The hybrid model of work

There are certainly benefits to it. According to research from Slack, most knowledge workers want a hybrid remote-office model in future. Hardly any want to return to the office full time. Those results are mirrored across sectors and industries, inferring that companies who want to attract the best talent may have to offer hybrid working as a benefit.

Even among businesses with large sales and customer service teams, the benefits of hybrid working may outweigh inevitable misgivings. Many businesses believe they can cut post-pandemic costs by reducing office estates and moving to smaller premises that only have to accommodate a proportion of a firm’s total workforce at any one time.

Put it all together, and it means remote working probably isn’t going anywhere, even after Covid. And even businesses that remain determined to return en masse to the office eventually have no real idea of when that time might be.

So, we’re trying to balance all of this, with changing consumer contact habits – increased adoption of new channels and differing contact patterns – as well as a globally reported increase in contact centre demand, with support firm ZenDesk seeing a steady 16 per cent increase in support contact requests above pre-pandemic levels³.

Productivity challenges

So instead of holding on to pre-pandemic processes, businesses might be better asking how they can adapt more effectively to the ‘normal’ of today while also preparing for whatever tomorrow might throw at them.

Or to put it simply, how do you equip your remote staff with the tools they need to work as productively away from the office as they can in it? How do you train and mentor your teams remotely? How do you continue to delight customers and drive sales when most of your team is working from home? When your workforce returns to a socially distanced office, or splits its time between the office and home, how do you maintain a consistent customer experience?

Businesses have been asking similar questions since last March, of course. But many now realise that the sticking-plaster solutions hastily implemented then are no longer enough, especially when it comes to customer contact. Communications platforms need to give employees the tools they need today, while future-proofing businesses for whatever next month, next year or even the next decade might bring.

Is cloud-first the answer?

It’s for that reason that businesses of all kinds are turning to cloud-based solutions. When your contact centre solution lives in the cloud, your agents can access it from anywhere, on any device, onboarding new starters and completing system training remotely is easier. And, with solutions like MaxContact, new features and functionality are consistently introduced as market trends and business needs change.  

But there’s more to a future-proof solution than simply the convenience of cloud. It has to be highly reliable, flexible and secure, while giving you the data you need to measure performance and implement change.

MaxContact is cloud-native for that reason. You get the assurances with the combination of a fully equipped contact centre solution that fulfils all these requirements combined with a resilient uptime guarantee of  99.999% so dropouts and downtime won’t affect sales and customer service. Whilst real-time dashboards and custom reporting give managers full transparency over their teams’ efficiency, wherever they happen to be located.

reduction in training, the issue of training a workforce in the contact centre fast and easily remotely has been of major benefit

This valuable data can eventually be used to inform decision making around post-pandemic working models, giving a real insight into the benefits and challenges of remote working models based on your specific circumstances for every campaign and every call centre agent. This data becomes invaluable in a world were presenteeism in some form has been part of most of our everyday lives for the past 12 months.

Security concerns

Working from home has meant that the companies networks – that were once a secure perimeter – have expanded to every employee home and the plethora of devices they use. There’s now an increasing need to deploy communications solutions with network and data centre security baked in. But we go further. Granular permissions mean you can limit the data your home working teams have access to and remove restrictions at the click of a mouse on those days when they are working from the office.

In fact, MaxContact gives you that kind of agility throughout your contact centre operation. You can add and remove users in minutes, and equip new sites in just a couple of days. MaxContact lets you calculate your staffing requirements using statistical analysis so that, wherever your workforce is based, you always have the right staff with the right skills in place.

In other words, powerful contact centre solutions like MaxContact don’t just solve the temporary challenges of remote working. They equip your business for an uncertain future.

Use our powerful cloud platform to create an agile, secure and streamlined contact centre that not only adapts to the unpredictable challenges of the post-pandemic world.

Sources:

1. https://www.bluearrow.co.uk/find-staff/workforce-insights/impact-of-covid-on-call-centres
2. Call centre helper, 2021 predictions webinar
3. https://www.zendesk.co.uk/blog/zendesks-benchmark-snapshot-impact-covid-19-cx/

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We are pleased to announce FPE Capital have helped finance an acquisition of MaxContact led by the MaxContact management team.

Lars Pedersen, a serial SaaS executive, has joined the board as Non-Executive Chairman.

The acquisition will further help realise the management teams vision for the company and solution. With an investment of over £1.25m in additional staff already taken place, clients can expect an accelerated roadmap, more comprehensive product offering and uplift in service delivery. MaxContact will continue to innovate and enhance the solutions to all clients, along with an additional focus on other key areas such as security, compliance, stability and scalability of the solution.

David Barbour, Managing Partner at FPE, commented:

“FPE is delighted to have completed the growth investment into MaxContact. Our expertise is focussed on investing in companies operating in large markets that are experiencing change, where we can help the management team to accelerate their growth rate. The case for brands to improve their customers’ experience and scale their own operations by moving to a cloud-native solution such as MaxContact’s is proven. We are delighted to be supporting Ben and the management team in capitalising on that trend in the coming years”.

Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact, added:

“We are delighted to have chosen FPE as our partner. Their experience in technology, and SaaS in particular, is a real differentiator and we are pleased to have them on board as we accelerate our product roadmap and invest in our go-to-market capabilities”.

MaxContact is customer engagement software that drives impact, conversions, and smarter customer experiences. Find out more about us.

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MaxContact have announced that they have moved four UK contact centres amassing to nearly 2,500 contact center agents to work remotely from home using the MaxContact platform, in response to increased call volumes and capacity requirements due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid deployment and on-boarding of two new centres along with elastic expansion of two existing clients provided the ease and flexibility required for immediate deployment of such vital services.

Further emphasising the agility and convince true cloud service providers can offer, MaxContact provided all 4 centres within 48 hours to its clients, all working from home and including training and materials to the two new customers.  MaxContact continual success as a disrupter to the industry was emphasised further by the speed and security the system offers in order to pass the stringent criteria for healthcare campaign.

“The providers perform critical contact centre services for the COVID-19 related calls, this critical service needs to be robust, reliable and secure for its centres” said Ben Booth CEO, MaxContact.”  This, along with other Covid-19 campaigns we have onboarded during this time makes us proud.  It shows how far we have come as a company in such a short space of time, we have been chosen by four separate centres and showing we can meet the demands of such rapid, agile and robust solutions required to help with the Covid-19 crisis”, Pat Ryan – MBA Group.

“Working with MaxContact we were able to get the system up and running, staff and agents trained and all working from home.  The whole process and speed of delivery, with the ability scale so quickly was of great benfit to us.  We simply wouldn’t have been able to onboard the campaign so fast if it was not for MaxContact”

“More and more companies are seeing the benefit of true cloud applications, being able to adapt to business needs and working with companies that can provide flexibility to scale up and scale down in their contracts as well as their service” said Ben Booth

Contact Centres are migrating to the cloud, a transition that looks only to be increasing, MaxContact are still operating at 100% capacity and seeing an uplift in opportunities across the robust, secure and agile contact centre marketplace. Secure homeworking has inevitably played a huge roll in this, along with the flexibility that cloud offers and suppliers like MaxContact will only continue to thrive in such a marketspace.

Analysts are predicting a significant growth in this sector with companies pulling forward plans for migration for business continuity and embracing home working environments that have been positive.

MaxContact is customer engagement software that drives impact, conversions, and smarter customer experiences. Find out more about us.

An ever-increasing proportion of consumers look for digital touchpoints when it comes to communication, and they want choice in the way they interact with organisations. Although voice still accounts for most customer interactions, contact centres are increasingly expected to provide non-voice channels such as Webchat, email and SMS to meet customer demand.

What is the difference between a “Multichannel” and “Omnichannel” contact centre?

If you’re looking to expand the capabilities of your call centre with non-voice channels, you must understand the difference between a multichannel solution and an omnichannel solution so you choose the right technology for your business operations.

What is a multichannel contact centre?

A multichannel contact centre provides basic flexibility by offering more than one method of communication such as phone, text and email. A multichannel solution gives customers a choice of channels, they often operate independently. A customer’s interaction history on one channel isn’t visible on others, which leads to fragmented customer service and frustration.

What is an omnichannel contact centre?

An omnichannel contact centre solution also offers a choice of channels, but with the crucial difference that converged communications are all in one place. Think of a customer service team where agents have a complete view of a customer’s interactions across all channels. If a customer starts a conversation via chat and then calls, the agent can pick up right where they left off.

While multichannel contact centres offer a basic level of flexibility, they often fall short in providing a truly seamless and personalised customer experience. The limitations of multichannel can lead to frustration for both customers and agents.

Omnichannel contact centres may require a higher initial investment, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. By providing a seamless, personalised customer experience, omnichannel can significantly improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency and give businesses a competitive edge.

5 considerations when choosing an omnichannel engagement software

With that in mind, here are five things you must look out for when considering a new omnichannel contact centre solution.

Security and Integration

It goes without saying that your next omnichannel engagement software needs to be super secure, but what does that mean in practice?

• Ensure the software complies with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
• Look for certifications like ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials to verify the software’s security.
• Assess the software’s ability to integrate with your existing systems, such as CRM and payment gateways.

Flexibility and Scalability

Businesses change – so choose an omnichannel solution that can adapt to your needs and scale as your business grows.

• Can the software be customised to meet your specific business needs and workflows?
• Can the software handle increased call volumes and support future growth?
• Does the software offer the necessary features, such as routing, IVR, and reporting, to meet your requirements?

Insights and Reporting

Effective reporting is crucial for understanding customer behaviour and optimising your operations – so what should you look out for when considering omnichannel software?

• Can the software provide real-time data on key metrics like call volume, average handling time and customer satisfaction?
• Can you create custom dashboards to visualise the data that matters most to your business?
• Does the software leverage AI to analyse call recordings and identify trends?

Ease of Use

Omnichannel solutions with a user-friendly interface can improve agent efficiency and reduce training costs.

• Is the software intuitive and easy to navigate for both agents and supervisors?
• Does the provider offer comprehensive training and support resources?
• Does the software provide tools like knowledge bases, scripting and screen sharing to enhance agent productivity?

Compliance

Effective omnichannel software should help you meet regulatory requirements and provide tools for compliance.

• Does the software help you meet industry-specific regulations, such as those related to telemarketing or debt collection?
• Are there features like call recording, scripting, and “Do Not Call” list integration to ensure compliance?

Additional Considerations

• Hidden Costs – Be aware of potential hidden costs, such as fees for additional features or demos.
• Support – Evaluate the quality and responsiveness of the provider’s support services.
• Expertise – Choose a provider with deep expertise in contact centre solutions.
• Accreditations – Verify the provider’s compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Why Choose MaxContact?

MaxContact is a powerful omnichannel contact centre solution offering a full range of contact options, from voice and email to SMS, webchat and even WhatsApp.
This is a fully converged service that puts all customer interactions in one place for seamless communication. For more information on our omnichannel solution, book a demo, or download our omnichannel brochure.

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Many businesses are now operating remote or semi-remote (hybrid) working models. With that in mind, here are five top tips for running a remote contact centre.

1. Have your morning meeting everyday

When you’re not all working in the same building, regular scheduled communication with your team becomes even more important. Luckily, tools like Zoom or Teams allow everyone to get together and talk at least once a day.

Morning meetings give you a chance to update your team on any changes to the campaign or market that may affect their day, find out about any issues they have, and deliver feedback on performance. It’s an essential way to keep your team motivated and performing at their best, wherever they’re located.

2. Trust your reports and dashboards

A remote contact centre team makes it more difficult to gauge how well (or badly) things are going at any time. In these circumstances, reports and dashboards are even more indispensable. Build specific dashboards to monitor agent, team and campaign performance, as well as one to give you an overview of everything. Most importantly, trust what they say.

Then, act on what they’re telling you. Somebody’s figures don’t look right? Dip test a few of their call recordings or do some live coaching. Sales figures looking down across the board? Get in touch with some of your team and find out why they’re struggling.

You also need to make sure your agents have access to relevant data. Wherever they’re working, set up report schedules to automatically send hourly and daily figures via email. Build team specific dashboards so they can see in real time the metrics that define their own performance. Leaderboards are a great way to keep healthy competition going, too.

3. Monitor regularly, and pass direct feedback over

It’s very easy to start feeling anonymous when working in a remote contact centre, and that’s when bad habits can set in. The ability to remotely monitor and coach your agents is crucial, because it gives them a sense of being properly and proactively managed.

Functionality such as whisper coaching also allows you to pass feedback directly to the agent and can even help you train staff in real time regardless of their location.

4. Make sure your IT is up to scratch!

There are steps you can take to ensure you don’t face any technical issues when your workforce is working fully or partly from home.

• • Make sure your team has working laptops/PCs, and operating systems and software are up to date.
• • If you need to use a VPN to access certain applications, DON’T go for the cheapest option. Do your research and get a proper solution as this may need to be used for all of your voice traffic.
• • Ensure your IT team can access agents’ PCs remotely to troubleshoot any issues.
• • If you use OneDrive or similar, make sure your agents have permission to see what they need and are trained on how to use it.
• • If you don’t have any internal IT now is the time to bring in an ITMS partner. There are loads out there to choose from.
• • It may also be time to upgrade your systems, as you rely a lot more on technology in a hybrid world. If you’re using an Open-source Dialler or Contact Centre you should definitely look at upgrading to something more resilient and feature rich.

5. Make sure your policies are nailed down – and adhered to

Now is the time to dust off policies on remote working and data security, and make sure they’re suitable for your current circumstances. Get everyone to read them again. The really crucial ones are:

• • Working from home – what do you expect of your staff when working from home?
• • Information security – how do your policies protect your customers’ data? Think about issues like working from unsecured WiFi networks and making sure devices are locked.
• • Acceptable use – you may well be issuing your staff with company laptops or PCs, so what do your policies say about what they can and can’t do with these devices?
• • Password policy – are your staff regularly changing passwords in line with your password policy? This has never been more important with many systems now open to the public internet.
• • Phishing policy – make sure your employees know how to check if a communication is genuine, and what to do if they have doubts.

Why MaxContact

MaxContact is a super-secure cloud-based contact centre solution which makes working from anywhere easy. Our powerful analytics and reporting platform lets managers stay on top of team and individual performance, whether agents are in the office or at home. For more information on MaxContact, please contact our team.

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