Improving Your Contact Centres

By Chris Mitchell

Customer-centricity is integral to growth – and as the bar to service has been raised, so have customers’ expectations on how they engage with an organisation. For some customers – whose only personal point of exchange with a company or government department may be through their contact centre – the contact centre and brand are interchangeable. So, having a contact centre that ensures a quality exchange is vitally important.

Even how Australians ‘contact’ a company has changed. For instance, at Optus, more than 80% of our service interactions are digital. Our customers expect a seamless service experience between a chat bot, instant message or a service expert.

Fortunately, the technology and solutions available for helping businesses deliver the leading contact centre capabilities have evolved, so organisations have opportunities to know their customers, deliver above expectations and build loyalty and advocates.

Optus Enterprise has partnered with companies who are leading the world with CX technology solutions. We offer our enterprise and government clients with deep domain expertise, including end-to-end delivery of managed-as-a-service experience that will fit, scale and evolve with their needs.

If people are the heart of a good contact centre, artificial intelligence is the brains of creating a smart contact centre. AI helps businesses better understand customers’ sentiment, behaviour and preferences – and where the gap lies with service the front line is delivering.

AI informs decision makers with actionable takeaways to improve the use of digital strategies, training needs and, ultimately, improve customer experience. AI can now detect emotion, pick up key words, analyse dead time and – impressively – teach improvements through automated channels. In fact, when our own consumer contact centres were impacted by overseas lockdowns, we fast tracked the release of our own chat bot – which has so quickly evolved that it now solves one in six incoming queries.

Enterprises also recognise that when employees who can engage customers from any location the organisation benefits from a more agile workforce able to adapt even better to needs of their customer base. Cloud Contact Centre Solutions enable organisations to flex dynamically to meet changing environmental factors such as Government restrictions. The backbone of any location-less workforce is a strong cloud capability which, again, is an area where Optus’ expertise can augment or supplement an enterprise’s current cloud profile.

Finally, just a word about cyber: as most customer interactions are likely to involve sensitive, personal information, security must be built-in. Encryption and data privacy must be at the core of contact centre operations. Our clients – and their customers – would expect nothing less – and neither would we.