Contact centres are a critical business enabler, providing businesses with their closest form of direct communication with customers, but they are costly and complex to operate and few customers experience delight at their interactions. In addition, the traditional approach of on-premise systems is outmoded as customers choose the channels they prefer to use and existing systems can’t deliver the flexibility needed to enable this.
At the same time, the habits of workers have changed with many choosing to work remotely. This places new demands on contact centre operators as they need to ensure agents have the training and support they need to perform effectively.
The ability to combine the familiarity of Teams with its flexibility has resulted in increased adoption of Teams Contact Centre. A growing number of organisations. are adopting Teams as the foundation for their call centre and then overlying a Teams certified contact centre to add the bells and whistles such as omnichannel, complex routing and integration with application such as CRM and workforce management to create the framework for high quality, richer customer engagements.
“This is how a certified Teams Contact Centre integration helps organisations enrich the experience,” confirms Ahmed Kishk, a solutions architect at Resonate, a Teams Contact Centre service provider.
“With our vendor partners we provide not only call centres but customer contact across all channels. This means they can use mail, chat, social and message channels. We also have the ability to include chatbots and AI for queries that don’t need real agents. We can design and set up the most complex routing pattens for contact centre and agents.”
The ideal scenario is a seamless contact centre experience that takes in the need to enable omnichannel experiences while also providing smooth integrations to other systems such as CRM and voice calling. However, traditional systems are fragmented and demand agents repeatedly learn how to use them efficiently as they traverse different systems and utilise different communications channels.
“The main barrier to customer engagement is the agents themselves,” adds Kishk. “To get them familiar with new technology and tools is a major challenge and there is always resistance to change. We therefore need to provide tools that are familiar to users and agents and that also deliver new capabilities in communications and collaboration.”
