Call centre agents work best when they work together. However, despite the rise of new solutions for collaboration, many of today’s enterprises still rely on old-fashioned and outdated methods of communications. Mass emails continue to be the primary solution for connectivity, though these messages are often impersonal, slow, and inconvenient.
Importantly, poor communication methods don’t just make life harder for the contact centre expert. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”RingCentralUK” suffix=””]Professionals who can’t collaborate effectively also struggle to deliver the best experience to end users and customers. This means that organisations lose out on valuable brand loyalty, upsells, and repeat sales.[/inlinetweet] In fact, according to Glance, 91% of customers won’t do business with a company again after one bad experience.
The Collaborative Contact Centre: Create a More Productive Workforce
With new tools for contact centre team communications, the people in your company can connect with more experienced agents when they need help answering customer questions, evaluate presence to send the right client to the best rep, and improve working conditions to minimise stress.
With a collaborative contact centre, you can effectively improve agent engagement and productivity, make it easier to share information between groups, and fundamentally enhance the customer experience. The result is a stronger, more profitable company with better customer satisfaction levels, and lower turnover rates.
Let’s look at the benefits of collaboration tools in closer detail.
1. Help agents to provide faster, better service
It’s not uncommon for call centres to experience a fast rate of turnover, particularly with temporary employees and job-hopping trends on the rise. This means that companies need to have a plan in place to provide a consistent level of experience to their customers through trained, knowledgeable agents.
With a collaboration tool, agents can speak with experts in real time to answer difficult questions when customers are most in need of support. Click To Tweet
A collaborative contact centre allows agents to access useful resources and files during customer conversations, so that they can adjust their efforts according to industry practices. What’s more, these resources mean that your new hires can quickly and effectively reach out for help from experienced supervisors when they’re struggling with a difficult client.
2. Access experts outside of the contact centre
Some particularly complicated issues might require agents to seek help outside of the contact centre. Many help desk environments offer different tiers of support to their customers, ranging all the way from front-end support intended to deal with common issues to specialist support from engineers and technicians.
To properly serve your customers, your agents might need to reach out to experts outside of the contact centre sphere, including billing departments, contractors, and more for collaborative problem-solving. The traditional solution requires representatives to email individuals, request help, and then eventually call a customer back. However, with a collaboration tool, agents can speak with experts in real time to answer difficult questions when customers are most in need of support.
3. Create close connections with customers
While it won’t always be possible to rectify a problem on the first contact, it’s important for today’s brands to make sure that they’re offering their clients the best possible experience when they reach out to the contact centre.
With a solution like RingCentral Collaborative Contact Centre, agents are allowed to engage in collaborative problem solving, document sharing, and direct connections with subject-matter agents to ensure that every issue is resolved as quickly as possible. This ensures that every company can work on developing strong, long-term relationships with their customers that lead to repeat revenue and high satisfaction rates.
Ultimately, when a contact centre implements the right tools for collaboration and cohesion, it transforms workers into a high-performance team, capable of increasing revenue, speeding up sales, and delighting customers. Whether all your employees are located in-house, or you’re attempting to bridge the gap between your remote workers and your internal group, the right collaboration strategy brings everyone together in a productive, profitable way. For the modern contact centre, collaboration is the key to customer satisfaction, employee retention, and business growth.
Learn more about how contact centre technology can create a better experience for customers and agentsLearn more
Originally published Apr 10, 2018, updated Jan 17, 2023
