More contact centre excellence, less investment in new technology

Today’s consumers expect a seamless contact centre experience – and they judge you on how well you perform. And bad news travels fast. A poor experience with your organisation is quickly shared within social media communities and compared with the performance of your competitors.

With 65% of customers saying they’ve changed to a different brand because of a poor experience, and around 80% saying that after more than one bad experience, they’d rather do business with a competitor – the business and financial value of a great experience can’t be underrated. Especially when it takes a staggering 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one bad one.

Customers prioritise fast problem resolution, rapid answers, easy access to information, multiple communication channels, and expect your agent to have their details upfront. So, the performance bar and the loyalty stakes are high.

With Microsoft Digital Contact Centre call routing to minimise wait times, intelligent call swarming, self-service, and multiple interaction options, including virtual agents, your customers get their answers faster.

The cost and complexity of upgrading technology shouldn’t be a barrier to doing better business.

As the Microsoft Digital Contact Centre Platform is made up of some of Microsoft’s most popular technologies, the investment level is lower, and agent uptake (and therefore productivity) is improved. What was a cost centre becomes a revenue driver.

The open nature of the Microsoft Digital Contact Centre Platform means you can build on what you already have and easily supplement it with a combination of new capabilities—for example, adding CRM (customer relationship management) to provide on-the-spot agent access to customer details. With Microsoft’s ready-to-use connectors, you can scale up your existing CRM capabilities to make the most of your investment – you don’t need to use just Microsoft products to enhance your contact centre solution.

Best of all, you can start small or go big when and how you want to – without blowing your budget.

While the rest of your business may be experiencing an annual employee attrition rate of between 9.5% (Australia) and 20.5% (New Zealand), the average in your contact centre as of 2022 (According to SMQ Group) is more likely to be 38%. Making your contact centre the unhappiest department in your business – by far.

This equates to higher recruitment and training costs and a disengaged agent workforce likely to deliver a very average customer experience. While an employee engagement programme, complete with rewards and incentives, will certainly help with retention, so will making your contact centre a less stressful place to work.

With the Microsoft Digital Contact Centre, you can automate agent tasks to help relieve tedium, make call resolutions easier with proactive AI assistance, and rope in subject matter experts to answer tricky questions. As the platform is omnichannel, customers can opt to self-serve or interact with virtual agents, reducing call queues – and pressure on your agents. Likewise, call routing can allocate customer calls to the best person available to deal with them, so your agents never feel out of their depth.

Using AI bots to find answers based on the context of a call, providing fingertip access to customer details and a browser-style knowledge bank, means your agents are more empowered to do their jobs confidently and positively.

The Microsoft Digital Contact Centre is a single, unified platform that simplifies life for your IT team. It’s an open, extensible, adaptive platform, so you can maintain the flexibility you need while building a fully featured solution without requiring complex integrations.

You can automate easy and complex workflows and tasks using no-code, low-code and pro-code development, set up virtual chatbots, build your own resource library and more – leveraging internal skills and knowledge (or ask your Microsoft partner to help you). And naturally, as a CCaaS (contact centre as a service), the platform is cloud-based, your agents can work from anywhere at any time.

So, your organisation is ready to take on the world.