Many organizations, regardless of their size or industry focus, will have employees who need to frequently interact with customers. However, that doesn’t always necessitate the use of a comprehensive, formal “contact center” platform.
For budget-conscious companies, an informal contact center solution can optimize employee and customer experiences, streamline operations, and reduce costs, combining customer service tools with pre-existing communication systems, like Microsoft Teams.
A lightweight, innovative, and omnichannel informal contact center solution not only empowers businesses to accomplish more with less, but offers channel partners and resellers an excellent opportunity to differentiate their services in the competitive communications industry.
Here’s your behind-the-scenes guide to the rise and benefits of informal contact centers.
What is an Informal Contact Center?
An informal contact center is what companies build when the people who handle customer needs on a day-to-day basis aren’t necessarily full-time contact center agents. They include IT, accounting, finance, and other back-office experts who work together on customer service.
Demand for technology and solutions that support informal contact center operations has increased in recent years. Evolving customer expectations, new workplace trends (such as hybrid and remote work) and technological advancements are reshaping the contact center environment.
While not every company requires a formal contact center environment, every organization does need an effective way to communicate with and engage customers. Informal contact centers empower companies to leverage their existing communication resources (such as Microsoft Teams), alongside integrations and customer service solutions, with an exceptional level of flexibility.
A channel provider can build the ideal “contact center” environment for a company, leveraging their Microsoft Teams instance, Azure calling applications, and lightweight connectors to CRM systems, analytical tools, and reporting features, creating a unique environment for customer service.
The Benefits of Informal Contact Center Solutions
Informal contact centers benefit from being more cost-effective, agile, and user-friendly than their traditional, “formal” counterparts. They empower channel partners and companies to embed contact center functionality into their existing resources, ensuring every employee can play a role in enhancing customer service, even if they’re not a full-time contact center agent.
Solutions like Voca’s Conversational Interaction Center for Microsoft Teams transform an organization’s existing MS Teams investment, with a certified, lightweight solution, built on Azure, and packed with valuable tools for unifying customer and employee experience.
The benefits of these informal contact center solutions include:
Enhanced Employee Experience, and Performance
Informal contact center solutions like Voca optimize a company’s existing investment in Microsoft Teams, aligning back-office experts, internal agents, and anyone else who may be responsible for managing customer service in one unified environment.
With a lightweight solution like Voca, companies gain instant access to an Azure-based app, using trusted Teams calling infrastructure, for internal and external communication. They can provide companies with a single, unified environment for collaboration and communication, allowing teams to organize interactions by channel and service, with dedicated call controls.
Plus, with integrations to CRM systems and knowledgebases, employees can access the insights they need to serve, support, and engage customers, without switching between applications.
Instant Access to Innovation
Formal contact centers aren’t the only groups that can benefit from technological advancements in the customer service landscape. Any employee responsible for interacting with consumers regularly can boost their productivity, and enhance performance with the right technology.
With a solution like Voca, employees gain access to innovative tools, like embedded conversational AI solutions that leverage speech-to-text, text-to-speech and natural language understanding to rapidly handle routine inquiries. Channel partners can even help to customize the informal contact center experience, offering access to drag-and-drop flow and workflow automation designers, that connect disparate systems and drive operational improvements.
Companies can even connect their conversational IVR flow to a CRM, to automate data collection, empowering employees to personalize future customer interactions.
Limitless Scalability
Informal contact center technology is lightweight, cost-effective, and easy to customize. This empowers companies to rapidly scale and adapt their customer service strategy over time, based on changing market dynamics. Companies can allow a limitless number of agents and supervisors to manage customer calls via Microsoft Teams, without the need for additional licenses.
What’s more, with support from technology vendors like Voiceflex, channel partners can empower companies to implement omnichannel service strategies. They can combine their Microsoft Teams phone solutions with messaging capabilities via WhatsApp, through tools like OmniChat.
This ensures customers can engage with your company using the channel they prefer, while agents get a centralized view of conversations and interactions, alongside the freedom to manage their availability based on changes in demand.
Comprehensive Contact Management
On its own, Microsoft Teams doesn’t have the capacity to allow companies to maintain granular control over call queues and flows. However, with informal contact center technology, channel partners can add this functionality into the Teams ecosystem.
They can empower companies to create unlimited skills-based routing strategies, define overflow thresholds, to ensure service levels are met, and leverage multi-platform queuing. This means companies maintain full control over how conversations are distributed and managed between teams.
Plus, with an all-in-one environment, companies can make sure digital and voice interactions in an omnichannel environment gain the same level of attention and focus. They can push interactions to customers based on their availability and status.
Opportunities for Data-Driven Growth
Finally, by combining Microsoft Teams with analytical and reporting tools, channel partners give informal contact center leaders insights into the data they need to make intelligent decisions for growth. Business leaders can review reports on IVR destinations and contacts, queue activity, call volumes, transfer rates, and more.
With tools like Voca for Microsoft Teams, employees can even access real-time dashboards, for an instant insight into abandonment statistics, pending calls, average wait times and more. These insights empower businesses to make strategic decisions, and help channel partners pinpoint opportunities to enhance service value with new tools and resources.
The Potential of the Informal Contact Center
While every company needs a comprehensive approach to delivering excellent customer experiences, this doesn’t always require a “formal” contact center solution. Channel partners can provide companies of all sizes with technology that allows them to build an intuitive, lightweight, and scalable informal contact center, tuned to their specific needs.
With companies like Voiceflex, channel partners can access state-of-the-art systems like Voca, for conversational AI and contact management in Microsoft Teams. Plus, they can expand on their offering with omnichannel solutions like Omnichat, empowering companies to adapt to changing customer preferences.
With an informal contact center, every business has the potential compete on the basis of customer experience, without unnecessarily high levels of complexity, or operating costs.
James Arnold-Roberts, CEO of Voiceflex says: “We are dedicated to supporting the channel with innovative solutions that enhance communication and customer engagement. The integration of Voca’s powerful informal Teams contact centre capabilities allows us to provide our partners with the tools they need to deliver exceptional service and drive business growth,” says James Arnold-Roberts, CEO of Voiceflex.
“Our commitment to empowering the channel with advanced technology ensures that businesses can stay ahead in a competitive landscape.”
For more information, visit Voiceflex.
