Is It Time for You to Upgrade Your Contact Center Technology?

I booked a trip to a hill station for three nights using a hotel booking app. After I reached there, I realized that I had to cut my trip to two days.

So, I called customer care of the hotel booking app and requested to cancel my third night of stay.

I was told that it is a non-refundable booking. However, the agent said that he will see how he can help me.

He said that he would have to call the property to check if they were fine with the cancellation. He said that it would take about 5 to 7 minutes for him to do that, and he asked me not to disconnect the call.

He wouldn’t be able to reach me otherwise. [That’s a red flag]

I held on to the call, and he spoke to me after about 5 minutes and said the property was fine to cancel the last day and the refund would be processed.

Again, the agent asked me to be on hold for 3 minutes so that he could process the refund and confirm it to me.

He wouldn’t be able to reach me otherwise. [That’s a red flag again]

After three minutes, he mentioned that the refund was initiated and said that they would send me a text to confirm the cancellation. He was on the line till I confirmed the receipt of the message.

While the resolution was great, the experience wasn’t that great.

The entire call took me about 12 minutes.

Ideally, the customer experience or the contact center platform should allow the agent to call me back.

It is time they change their contact center platform to accommodate easy callbacks to their customers.

What are the other scenarios that are red flags for you to consider upgrading your contact center platform?

Let Me Give You Three Common Scenarios:

Scenario 1

I want to add more agents to the platform to address my growing customer support needs.

My platform provider says that it would take 48 hours for them to configure new licenses, and they need a minimum commitment of twelve months for each of the new licenses they configure.

That’s a definite red flag. It is time to upgrade your contact center platform.

Configuring new licenses should take only minutes and not hours and days. Besides, the customer should be provided the option of scaling up and down the agents per their business needs.

They should ideally be on a pay-as-you-go model with absolutely no minimum guarantees or extended contracts.

Scenario 2

I want to customize the way my reports are generated, and I want to have a different dashboard view for various users in my organization.

My platform provider says that the customizations would take four months to complete, and it would cost a substantial sum to get this customization working.

That’s a definite red flag. It is time to upgrade your contact center platform.

Most customizations today shouldn’t take more than a few days or a week. Oftentimes, they are configurable with today’s cloud contact center platforms. If anyone says that it is going to take four months, rest assured you are on a legacy system, and it is time to move away from it.

Scenario 3

Your customers have to wait long to reach your agents, and your agents have to juggle between multiple screens to provide resolutions. Besides, your agents end up transferring your customers to numerous people before their issues are resolved, and your customers end up repeating themselves every time their line gets transferred.

That’s a huge red flag. It is time to upgrade your contact center platform.

The frustration here is both ways.

Your customers are frustrated as they had to wait long to reach and resolved and had to repeat themselves multiple times.

Your agents are frustrated as they are not able to find answers to customers’ challenges easily, and they have to juggle multiple screens to provide a resolution.

Ideally, your contact center platform should have strong integrations with your CRM, ERP, helpdesk software, other best-of-breed IT systems, and all the customer interaction systems and channels.

This would provide your agents with a single view of your customers, and they can provide resolutions faster to customers.

Besides, you should have multiple channels for customer interactions, especially the self-service channels, as 90% of the queries are transactional and can be addressed by these channels.

This would free up your agents’ time to address complex customer queries, reducing the customer wait times considerably.

Have you ever considered a cloud contact center platform?

The migration would be easy and smooth, and it shouldn’t take more than 48 hours to move to the new platform.

Would you believe that it addresses all your security, privacy, and compliance concerns? That’s one less headache for you as an organization.

What if they throw customizations as a part of their implementation at no additional cost? I am sure this likely is a deal breaker.

What if I say that you would pay per minute, you don’t have to be worried about the number of agents or licenses, and you don’t need to have any minimum commitment or long contracts in place?

This is precisely what our platform provides our customers. We have migrated thousands of agents to our platform within hours.

Keep these in mind when you decide to migrate.