As the customer experience industry transforms from providing a service to a combination of brand management, customer retention and compliance, Oak Innovation Ltd has recognised the pressure on long standing call centre processes and legacy technology. These are all the now norm contact centre challenges that are seen day to day and are viewed as just part of the job. I spoke with Ian Bevington, Marketing Manager at Oak Innovation Ltd, who strongly suggests that you can address these challenges using your existing contact centre technology.
In general, it’s easy to agree that most contact centres are made up of largely disconnected technologies. If you audit any single contact centre, you will have a technology stack including at least all of the following:
- Phone System
- Customer relationship management system
- Call recording
- Payment automation solution
Ian breaks down how to not just combine these tools but integrate them to create a smarter working environment.
CRM integration
When your phone system and CRM system are integrated, you can see who is calling before answering a call. Together, these two core solutions can present frontline staff with extended functionality that is not achievable when deployed standalone. Contact centre agents are empowered with the information they need to verify callers and automatically pop customer records – driving a simpler and more efficient customer experience. These simple capabilities can speed up call handling, improve adherence to policy and free up staff to focus on the quality of conversations. Often things like workforce management are introduced to work on average call time and resource allocation. The benefits of integration should be assessed before a decision is made whether you need to add a further tool to your contact centre technology stack.
Call recording
Call recording and screen recording are essential business tools. If an agreement of any sort is made over the phone, it needs to be recorded. This could take the form of an order or a work instruction and doesn’t have to be a formal contract. Ian said:
“The need to ‘prove who said what’ is particularly important in environments where highly charged conversations can occur, or where complex conversations necessitate checking on the detail later”
When call recordings are tied a customer account in your CRM, recordings become more accessible. Rapid dispute resolution becomes possible and is vital to preventing escalation. Escalation means involving more resource that are busy elsewhere and a delayed customer resolution. Integration of call recording into your CRM also simplifies finding and deleting all personal data as part of GDPR right to be forgotten obligations.
Payment automation
As online security tightens is more strict and stringent than before, fraudsters attention has returned to payments over the phone. Cloud payment automation systems integrate with your existing payment service provider to descope your office environment from sensitive card data and significantly reduce risk. This, in turn, ensures PCI compliance within your organisation – as it is the business that must be compliant, rather than the technology.
Ian then poses the question to businesses: “But why stop there?” By integrating payment automation with your CRM solution, you have a single pane of glass for your payment interaction. In addition, payment automation systems can be used to automate debt collection through outbound dialing and self-service payment collection.
Richard Garel-Jones, Product Director at Oak Innovation Ltd, will be speaking more about workflow, customer experience and compliance by integrating services in your contact centre at Call and Contact Centre Expo on the 27th and 28th March at London Excel. You can find out more about Oak Innovation Ltd at Call and Contact Centre Expo here.
