Understanding Contact Centre: Types and Strategy to Audit

How do you feel if someone gives you an old keypad phone to use in today's modern world? Frustrated right? You can't use features like email, the internet, social media, and many more. So, think about what happens when your customers have a smartphone with all these features yet can only contact you through a phone call. That's why you must know about contact centers. In this blog, you will explore customer contact points. Moreover, you will understand Contact Center Audit as well as its benefits.

What is a Contact center? 

We are starting with defining contact centers because people often mistook them for call centers. But that's not the whole truth. A very simple explanation of a contact center is that it has more than just one channel for communication. In a call center, the inbound and outbound calls are facilitated, while a contact center does the same with more channels like email, sms, social media, and, of course, phone calls. 

So, yes, contact centers are a more comprehensive hub for communications with your customers, and there are many benefits to it. But, as the points of interaction increase, the need for a more comprehensive audit also arises. Since you have more channels to communicate with your customers, you want better strategies and SOPs to standardize communication through all the channels. And an audit works well to do that. So let's see the benefits of audits and quality management for contact centers but first here are the types of contact centers you need to know exist.

5 Types of Contact Centers

Inbound Contact Centers

Inbound contact centres handle the incoming queries from customers. You can think of them as the traditional call centres but with more than just phone calls coming in. They collect and respond to queries through phone, emails, social media and other channels. Live chat also comes under inbound contact centre support.

Outbound Contact centers

Outbound centers are delegated to focus on calling customers to initiate new interactions. They make sales calls, surveys, or customer service follow-ups. Unlike inbound centers, they do not deal with incoming calls. Agents use pre-populated contact lists and automatic dialing systems. Their main purpose is to do tasks like lead generation and upselling.

Multichannel Contact Centers

These centers handle customer questions across multiple platforms. So, agents help clients through calls, emails, web chat, social media, and SMS. These centers offer call management tools just like regular call centers but add reporting across all communication channels. It ensures that each interaction is tracked and analyzed properly.

Omnichannel Contact Centers

The omnichannel contact center is like an upgraded version of multichannel support. They go a step further by integrating all channels together. So, agents can easily view a customer's entire history across phone, email, chat, or social media. Hence, it ensures a smoother communication. It also improves first-call resolution and enhances the customer experience.

On-Premises Contact Centers

These are traditional centers that operate from physical locations. They are mostly outdated due to cloud technology, except for industries with strict data requirements, like banking. These centers need significant hardware and setup, and this is the reason why they are less flexible than cloud setups. They also cost a lot when it comes to maintenance.

Four Benefits of Contact Centre Audits

Measuring the quality of interaction

In a call center, only the interactions made through calls can be audited. However, if you provide omnichannel customer support then you should prefer a contact center audit as it will help you analyze all interactions through different channels like email and SMS as well. By measuring the quality of the interaction you can know the strengths and weaknesses of your customer support.

Gap Analysis for improving the response

There are cases in which even after the query seems to be resolved, the outcome isn’t the same as expected. So, what is the problem? You can know the actual root cause of the unexpected result through a contact center audit. It lets you know why the gap got created and hence you can improve your response accordingly.

Increase customer retention

Whenever customers face some problem with your products or services, they can contact you through any of the channels you are available in. This way you can prevent losing those customers who don't want to connect with brands' customer support over phone calls. There's a surge in Gen Z people who don't want to connect over phone calls. So it can also be a word of mouth opportunity to have support over other channels. But it's important that all these channels are actually in sync and follow SoPs which can be ensured with contact center audits.

Improve employee experience

Train your employees properly on how to handle queries. It will make the job easier for them. Besides, give them clear guidelines which will help them to know which queries they need to solve and which ones should go to other departments. It will reduce the pressure and workload on the employees and they will work more efficiently.

Choosing a Contact Center Auditing Company : Steps to Follow

Here are a few strategic steps that you must take before choosing a contact center auditor for your business.

Assess your needs and objectives.

First, look at your needs, like what channels you want and what the objective of the contact center will be. Then inquire the contact center auditor about your objectives to know if both your views are aligned or not. Keeping clear goals will help you make a more informed and quicker decision.

Shortlist the Contact center.

Another important point is to shortlist the contact center auditors who are providing auditing services for all the channels that you need. So, if you are on email and social media, the auditor must provide quality services for both channels.

Check for the Integration

Now check if the CRM that you use is also known by the auditor. They should be able to work with your integrated software. In order to provide an effective audit.

Check for Analytics and Reporting Infrastructure

It is a must to check whether the contact center auditor can provide proper analytics and reports for you or not. It will help you with the contact center quality assurance. 

Improvement in your Customers' Experience

It is a point to consider once you are onboard with a contact center auditor. If your customers' experience is getting better, it's a good sign. Basically, it will act like a KPI.

QAViews: Your Standalone Partner for Contact center Audits

Waiting to make improvements once you get an audit report can result in frequent losses as the improvement will be made late. Here, you should consider a service that is faster yet effective. Our quality interaction audit is a service we offer to audit your contact center with our tool called QAViews. It is a complete package for quality assurance in the contact center. You can get live analytics and features like a quick rebuttal, which makes your contact center audits more accurate and possible in real time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, understanding the benefits and types of contact centers is crucial for modern businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction. With the right strategy and our quality interaction audit service powered by QAViews for real-time audits, businesses can streamline their communication, improve efficiency, and ultimately provide better customer experiences across multiple channels.