Contact Center Management is the process in which the interaction with the customer is managed. The process needs to provide the best customer experience with the right growth in the revenue. The process includes various functions such as:

• Interaction with a customer
• Time management
• Forecasting of the workforce
• Reporting

The Contact Center helps to provide a unique experience to the customer. The process revolves around the customer such as easily managing the customer interactions, tracking critical metrics for the management of the contact center, increasing the efficiency and productivity of the contact center, and managing the contact center from anywhere. The goal of the contact center management is to provide optimized customer service with the sales and customer support assistance.

In the image, the 4 pillars of contact center excellence people, process, technology, and methodology can be seen. You need to have the right set of skilled professionals, who can execute the right process for providing a unique experience to customer. The technology such as telephone, chat, email, IVR, etc. are various technologies and modes of communication with the customer.

To measure the effectiveness of the methodology there are various KPI tools, metrics, understand the root cause analysis and others.

The major features of the contact center are:

• The scripts that help the agents with the right structure for interacting with the callers and generate the sales alongside providing the right support.
• The advanced call distribution process helps the contact service providers to maximize the number of calls to maintain a positive customer experience.
• The real-time reports that help the contact center for observing customer satisfaction.

What are the available contact center in the industry?

• Cloud-based contact center: The cloud-based contact center is the center from where all the outbound and inbound communications are filtered. The center can be easily accessed , wherever you are in any part of the world.
• Virtual contact center: The virtual contact center are the ones that could help the agents to work from home. It helps to create the right flexibility.
• Hosted contact center: These centers are the ones that help the infrastructure of the contact center to be outsourced to the other company. The infrastructure cost of the organization is significantly reduced.
• Hardware contact center: These centers are the ones that are installed on the servers of an organization. The centers are dependent on the organizations for maintaining sufficient space and the effective recovery procedure of disaster.

How can contact center management provide a seamless customer experience?

The contact center is one of the crucial customer touch points for delivering a seamless customer experience. Customers want personalized communication with the agent, which a contact center management can help to provide. Many of the contact centers are using the latest technologies to provide exceptional customer experience.

The technologies are:

• AI and automation: Artificial intelligence has significantly evolved over the years to provide good customer service. The contact centers have enormous information that the AI connects to bring the change needed by agents to communicate with the customers. AI can make the agent more smarter while communicating with the customer. Many new contact centers have the AI based routing capabilities. AI has the capability to drive customer experience on the right path and increase the loyalty.
• The RPA to the rescue: The robotic process automation helps to automate the repetitive tasks , that consume much of the time of the representatives. It can schedule the updates, helps to process the voicemail messages, and others. This helps the representatives to focus on other crucial activities that cannot be automated.

• Implementing visual IVR: With an increased number of customers purchasing services and products online, the contact center should have an optimized approach to serve these customers. The IVR or the visual interactive response system helps you in the transfer of IVR technology to the mobiles so that it becomes easy for the users to communicate via the IVR interface.

The advantages of contact center management are:

• Enhanced customer experience
• Increased productivity
• Decrease in cost
• Better efficiency
• Enormous sales
• Provides customer support on all channels

How can you improve the performance of the contact center?

• Sharing the best practices
• Segmenting the customers
• Building a relationship with customers
• Empowering agents
• Examining the key performance indicator
• Providing the right training aligned with the goals of the organization
• Developing a customer-centric environment
• Prioritizing the scheduling of agent

Conclusion:

With revenue and business revolving around the customer, contact center management needs to adopt new practices and technologies to make informed decisions and satisfy the customer.

An organization should be quick to reach out to the customer to answer their queries and resolve critical issues. In the coming years, one would witness the implementation of new strategies that would make contact center management process more streamlined and effective in the long-run.