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Why Adoption of Cloud Contact Center Is Increasing?

A shift from on-premise to cloud solution has become the talk of the town. Why enterprises are keenly adopting cloud solution and reconsidering the decision of on-premise setup?
By 2020, it is expected that 83% of enterprises will opt for cloud solutions, says Forbes Report.
For the largest part of history, on-premise was the default choice for businesses but it changed with the rising cloud deployment model for easy upgrades. Cloud solution addresses the challenges like working in multiple geographies without hardware installation, allowing businesses to up and running in no time.
Cloud-based contact center solution is equipped with all the features that an on-premise solution has with an added benefit of being hosted over the internet. The internet ready solution drives big players in the market like Uber, making it easy for agents to connect with drivers and update disposition without delaying the process.

How Adoption of Cloud Helps Agents?

Working Across Geographies: Cloud allows agents to work from remote locations and removes the barrier of working in different geographies. With a cloud-first technology, it becomes easy to provide 24 hours service to the clients.
Automate Calling Operations: Agents, after a number of retries, connects with the right client when they manually dial the numbers with the hard phone. With an auto-dialer in place, the call connects rate increases, thus allowing agents to remove human error and reach to more customers in a given time.
Visibility into Customer’s Needs: A great customer experience is not built overnight. Agents with the right tools like unified agent desktop provide them an insight into customer’s journey through different channels. When an Uber agent finds the feedback from the customer on Facebook, reporting about the unprofessional behavior of the driver, the agent can easily find the customer information in their desktop and can take actions needed.

How Adoption of Cloud Helps Businesses?

With the emerging needs of customers, businesses look for robust technologies to deliver a personalized experience to customers while providing a tailor-made solution to customer’s queries.
A cloud contact center solution helps businesses cater to customers’ evolving expectations relentlessly.

Change from CAPEX to OPEX

Say goodbye to hardware installation and budgeting a capital expenditure for infrastructure setup because you can now run your business with cloud contact center software. Pay for what you use and deploy cloud model at a much faster pace. In addition to cost benefits, reduce operational overheads and operate your business with ease while inducing better ROI for your business.

Scale as you Grow

Adopting a cloud-based technology helps businesses grow elastically. Cloud technology permits the flexibility of scaling up or down to stay ahead of delivering smooth customer experience. Expansion of business operations is just at the tip of fingers as hardware sizing is managed by the cloud service provider.

Channelize Cyber Security

With moving the data to the cloud, it becomes more important to keep in check the security of this data. Customers share their information with the faith in the brand and expect the businesses to adhere to security benefits. Secure your data with Virtual Private Network (VPN) and leave no chance for the data breach.

Ensure Business Continuity

Cloud-based solution provides high levels of business continuity as redundancy/backup is often available as a default offering by the cloud service provider. There will be no hardware failure leading to downtime, thus, no break in the customer service when an unforeseen disaster occurs.

According to a Forbes report, more technology-dependent industries including manufacturing, high-tech, and telecom are being led by executive management to become 100% cloud.
If you are planning to adopt cloud-first technology and setup your own contact center, irrespective of the business size and looking to know about the why and how of cloud suite, do check out Ameyo’s Cloud Contact Center Solution to ease your decision making.

How to Improve Ticketing Insights with Helpdesk Reports and Dashboards

Actions speak louder than words. We have all heard of this saying. But it has never been truer as in the case of Customer Support Process. The success of a customer support process is dependent on measuring the right KPIs and getting relevant reports. Tracking these KPIs and analyzing these reports allows the supervisors to make effective strategic decisions. Today we will be looking at some of the aspects which can be improved with Helpdesk reports and dashboards. Some of the benefits of having the right reporting and measuring tools are as follows. Actions speak louder than words. We have all heard of this saying. But it has never been truer as in the case of Customer Support Process. The success of a customer support process is dependent on measuring the right KPIs and getting relevant reports. Tracking these KPIs and analyzing these reports allows the supervisors to make effective strategic decisions. Let us look at some of the aspects which can be improved with Help desk Software reports and dashboards. Some of the benefits of having the right reporting and measuring tools are as follows.

#1. Measuring Channel Effectiveness

As a business, you must be supporting various communication channels to allow the customers and prospects to connect with you on any medium. But how do you decide which channel should you focus on? Which channel has higher ROI compared to others. All these questions can easily be answered with the channel-specific reports. These reports will help the decision makers to monitor the overall channel coverage and their effectiveness. Post this analysis, the supervisor can decide which channels require an influx of resources and where the costs can be cut-off.

#2. Tracking Agent Performance

Monitor the agent productivity along the metrics using real-time dashboards which give a snapshot of the overall operations of the customer support process. The supervisor can look at real-time information such as how many agents are available at the moment, how many are on break and how many are currently working on the assigned tickets. Additionally, the agent productivity report also provides an understanding of the efficiency and adherence shown by the agents in the completion of the assigned tickets using parameters such as the volume of work assigned, the number of tickets transferred and/or the number of tickets picked proactively. Using these reports the supervisor can draw inference on the ticket achievement or the success rate.

#3. Reducing Ticket SLA Breach

The best way to deliver exceptional customer support is to set strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Though the work does not stop there. For continuous improvement, one needs to track these SLAs at the process and campaign level. The dashboards provide a graphical representation of real-time data allowing the supervisor to make spontaneous yet productive decisions. With helpdesk reports, create SLA reports for the process, campaign, and queue, monitor the areas that require improvement, and keep setting stronger SLA targets to deliver a refined customer service experience.

#4. Classification of Tickets

Categorize the tickets based on configurable parameters – campaign (sales, support), the status of the ticket (open, pending, or closed). This will allow the supervisor to discern which types of tickets do you get the most. Based on this information, the supervisor can effectively shuffle the resources and streamline the process. The good news is, it’s not a size fits all type of situation – the supervisor can customize the fields of the reports according to the business needs for effective decision making.

#5. Tracking Ticket Escalations

A customer support process is deemed to be successful when the ticket escalation rate is within the acceptable range according to the business standards. But, how do you monitor these escalations? By getting its report. Having this data at their disposal, the supervisors can identify the problem areas or possible bottlenecks to rectify them.

#6. Report Scheduling for Target Recipients

Automate the report delivery to the selected stakeholders and ensure everyone is kept in the loop. Opt for certain reports (can use the templates as well) to be emailed to the target recipients such as the department head, supervisor, accounts to pass on the right information to the stakeholders. The reports can be scheduled to be delivered at a specific time at the end of the day to give the supervisor to go through them and plan the next day or week’s activities.

#7. Design your Own Reports with Report Designer

Unlike dashboards, which are most suitable for live monitoring, with reports it is possible to analyze the past performance as well. This becomes even more relevant and easy when you can customize the reports for the important metrics. Slice and dice the reports to view only the data which is needed rather than being overwhelmed by information overload. The supervisor can choose which fields are needed in a specific report based on the business goal or the department to which it is going to be delivered. For example, the accounts department will only need the report about the percentage achievement for incentive calculation whereas, a supervisor will need to look at all the aspects of ticketing operation – ticket volume, number of pending tickets, average ticket handle time, to name a few. Additionally, by making customized templates, the Customer Support Head can ensure consistency of KPIs along with saving the effort on creating a report every time. It is possible to create multiple templates and keep them for future use. The supervisor can apply the filters on the list of report templates easily find and use them.

Conclusion

With the right measuring tools at their disposal, the supervisor and department heads are empowered with correct information to make the right decisions and foresee trends. Based on that insight they will be in a much better position to make strategic decisions that will yield good results. Having smooth ticket management powered by helpdesk reports and dashboards will lead to enhanced visibility of the KPIs, the overall ticket volume inflow for better resource management that will eventually equip the leadership to be prepared for any fluctuations or unforeseen situations. It all comes down to the fact that once you allow the data to guide your decisions, it refines and improves customer engagements.

Digitizing Collections with Advanced Debt Collection Software

Taking loans is just a click away nowadays as banks offer credit services via various types of loans and plastic cards. But the concern is that not all debtors can pay back on time. Few customers fail to pay due to various reasons like inability to keep track of payment due date, cash insufficiency, wilful default etc.

Owing to the frequent consumer borrowing and spending behavior, debt collection has been prevalent since the early days of banking. Banks and insurance organizations often struggle with debt collection and loan collection. Collection of debts from consumers is increasingly focused upon by regulators as it is the chief source of income for banks and impart huge stress on the liquidity of the companies. The increasing age of receivables results in a higher probability that people will chicken out from paying debts.

Dealing with debt recovery needs several initiatives to be undertaken to ensure that the debtors’ payback. Banks try to reach out to customers to remind them of the due date through various modes like email and text message (SMS). When none of the aforementioned steps bear fruit, the bank usually hands over the responsibility of collecting the debt to a Third-Party Agency.

Let’s take a scenario where Brinda is the collection manager of the collection agency named FastDebtRecover Pvt Ltd. The agency gets the account and tries to receive the Promise To Pay from the customer to help SmartInvestment Bank to recover their debts. In this reaching the account is a tedious task as in the absence of right debt collection strategy, she has to dial on all the phones of the customer manually. She has to manually track expected payments. There is a high probability that she will miss critical steps needed in carrying out statistical cash forecast.

In a nutshell, Debt collection certainly requires a robust software to manage debtors’ accounts, handle their queries, and fairly guide them to pay the debts on time. A debt collection software discovers, prioritizes and recovers debts by overcoming the Data, Process and Technology challenges and maximizes debt recovery.

To sum up here below are the key challenges that the collection agents have to face while reaching out to customers manually. Along with it are the listed benefits that a debt collection software brings in while reaching out to customers.

By now you must have got a fair idea of how the debt collection tech can help improvise your collection efforts and repurpose your collection efforts in a manner that it is more accurate, and the return on effort is higher. So if you are looking for an advanced debt collection software that can help you manage your collection process Easily, Efficiently and Effortlessly then check out Ameyo Collect that can help you beat out your collection challenges.

Overcoming Customer Support Challenges in the Travel Industry

Travel and tourism industry has seen major growth in the past couple of years with contributing about 10.4% to global GDP. That’s 4.6% more than the previous year (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2018). This growth has further been accelerated with the world going digital. Today, the way tourists discover or book their trips and vacations has changed drastically from the traditional travel agency setup. The travel and tourism industry needs to adapt to the changing times or be prepared to be left behind.

Adapting to the digital shift comes with its own set of challenges. Let us look at some of these challenges in detail and try to come up with the solutions for the same.

#1. Planning and Booking a Trip

The booking process has changed over the years. Unlike earlier times when we used to go to a travel agency or had a go-to travel agent, now we tend to just go on the world wide web and make the bookings. The industry is highly competitive. It is no big surprise then that a prospect will have a couple (if not more) options in their consideration basket. That’s where the first challenge comes in to play – how to be the first respondents and get those customers to your business.

Solution

Be proactive. For instance, a customer lands on your website and spends some considerable time on it. With live chat software, it is possible to proactively start a conversation with her/him and guide them to what they are looking for. One can also use a bot to handle the routine questions. In case the conversation takes a turn to some complex query for which the bot is not trained, seamlessly transfer the conversation to a live agent.

Simplify your travel customer support operations with Customer Support Software

#2. Limited Traveler Independence

By virtue of the nature of this industry, things need to work quickly here. Problems need to be solved fast. More so today as travelers are tech-savvy now. They know what they want and how to get it. The longer they have to wait for someone to find an answer or the more effort they have to put in to search for the answer, the more irritable they get.

Solution

Provide travelers and prospects with self-service support. Provide customers with the tools needed to take care of their problem on their own. This eliminates the need to speak to a representative and cuts down on the time used to wait for a response. Giving customers the ability to find answers online without speaking to anyone means that they will resolve the issue at a much faster rate and won’t need any extra assistance.

#3. Lack of Multi-channel Support on the Move

Sometimes while traveling, we have limited access to a network which restricts the use of certain communication channels. But that should not stop you from supporting your customers. That can only be ensured with helpdesk software, which supports all the major channels such as voice, email, chat, social media, WhatsApp, etc.

Solution

Provide omnichannel support to travelers. For instance, if a customer sends you a message on Twitter, your customer support executive will receive it as a new ticket. Any response on that ticket by the executive will be available to the traveler as a reply to the DM that they sent. The same can be done in case of other media platforms – an email reply, a live chat or support over a voice call.

#4. Lack of Personalization

Making the customer feel special goes a long way especially in the travel and hospitality industry. Knowing the customer’s likes and dislikes put the business in a much better position to deliver exceptional customer experience. But, without the right tools and mechanisms, you will be generalizing for all the customers/travelers. Thus, losing out on a perfectly good opportunity to delight the customers.

Solution

Analyze customer behavior to identify patterns which allow the support team to effectively manage the customer requests. Having all the customer information in front of the agent when they are talking to the customer will empower them with the right information along with not requiring the customer to repeat themselves. For instance, if a guest prefers to book a hotel room on the 5th floor or above but due to some reason, this time the room is booked on the 3rd floor. The support executive should have access to the travelers previous booking behavior to identify this pattern and possibly work something out to get her/him the desired room.

#5. Crisis Management

Traveling can be a hectic process as it is. Managing the documents, packing the luggage, arranging transport – to name a few. On top of that, if some unforeseen incident happens, it leads to a panic situation. Which if not dealt with in a timely fashion has the potential of snowballing into a much bigger problem.

Solution

Provide the travelers (irrespective of them being HNI passengers) with a hotline to directly connect with the support staff. For example, Mr. X who is traveling on a solo international trip loses his luggage and has a connecting flight in the next 2 hours. Making him wait on a long IVR will only make the situation worse. Thus, it is important to provide the customers with a hotline to directly connect with an agent in case of an emergency. If you are able to handle the crisis effectively, it will instill a sense of trust in the customer’s mind and they will become loyal to your brand.

Proven Benefits Of Contact Center Solution In Healthcare Industry

There’s no denying that the patients seek utmost support from hospitals and diagnostic labs at times of emergency. So, does it tell us that only emergency cases should be taken care of? Healthcare industry, while considering patients’ experience, roll out multiple changes like telemedicine promising a new dawn of trust to the patients.

Are you wondering what customer experience has to do with the healthcare sector? Often forgotten, patients’ journey does not end with the medical billing, their satisfaction and understanding of medical care is the ultimate goal for healthcare service providers.

According to a Deloitte Report, global healthcare spending is expected to rise 5.4 percent annually to just over $10 trillion.

And, that explains why patient experience is a top priority for hospitals and diagnostic labs. How do you communicate with your patients? Gone are the days when patients would wait in hospitals for their turn, now they seek robust and effective methods for instant care. Tailored virtual healthcare experience with a call center solution in place would help you to communicate with patients more effectively.

Challenges of the Healthcare Industry

Booking Appointment: A busy call line always makes patients wait in the queue and sometimes because of poor call connectivity, they fail to connect with the agents thus resulting in high call abandonment rate.
Insurance Claim: Patients find it really hard to get the insurance on their medication through the complex process of collecting the bills and identity authentication. Reimbursement seems a far dream for them when they are dealing with a severe medical condition.
Emergency Calling: Due to the complex structure of hospitals, patients get stuck with the difficulty of reaching the right ambulance driver in their region. And, they fail to track ambulances in real-time, thus resulting in delayed service and the urgency of treatment accelerates.
Report Collection: In a busy schedule, patients have no time to visit the hospitals/labs multiple times to collect the reports. Sometimes, a delayed diagnostic report leads to delay in treatment as they wait for the reports to arrive in stipulated time.

How Contact Center Solution Helps Healthcare Industry

Real-Time Tracking The Ambulance

In an emergency case, Rhea dials the emergency number and is redirected to a local driver in her region. That ensures her of reaching the hospital in no time, thus eliminating the risk of a serious medical problem.

She could do it because of smart location-based routing that helps in call identification and patching the call to the nearest ambulance driver in her region.

In-App Integration

Provide the feasibility of booking an appointment online within the app by integrating it with the management system. Patients will not be bound by time and they will not seek manual support when an appointment could be booked in a few clicks. Let them create a patient ID that would be accessible on all devices and they can choose their own convenient time for consultation.

Rhea feels shortness of breath because of the change in weather and she wishes to check it with the doctor if her Asthma has triggered again. She is a working woman and is only available post office hours. Now, that she has an option of checking the available slots online, she books an appointment at her convenient time with the doctor with ease.

Send Report Alerts

Make it easy for patients to collect the reports on their mobile phones. They are present on channels like Email, WhatsApp, and SMS, leverage your omnichannel presence and send the e-reports through multiple channels. This makes the process less complex and a lot faster. With instant reports, they could reach to their doctors and seek virtual support from them.

Rhea, after receiving her e-report on the same day, instantly gets connected with her doctor on chat and proceeds with her medication while interacting virtually.

Securely Maintain Patient Records

Breach in sensitive data risks the privacy of patients. With security compliance, all patient records could be saved from data theft. Integrating with CRM allows hospitals to access the data and check the patient’s history as and when required.

Engagement After Treatment

Patients’ journey does not end with the payment of bills and discharge from the hospital. Send timely alerts about health tips, check-up reminders via SMS, Email, WhatsApp etc., and build a strong patient-doctor relationship.

Rhea is reminded of the change in the weather and precautions she should take to prevent herself from Asthma attacks. She develops a healthy lifestyle and avoids dust exposure as suggested by her doctor.

Bring a different world for patients and make it easy for them to reach out to the hospitals with robust contact center software. With extensive benefits for patients, healthcare service providers can connect better with them undoubtedly. Make a patient-centric platform by optimizing call center technology.

Making Supervisor’s Life Easy with Call Center Monitoring

How do your agents perform? Are you stuck with manually analyzing the agent’s performance? Supervisors in a call center are the building pillars and they cannot escape the strict deadlines. A supervisor’s job does not end with monitoring agent’s efficiency, it only starts with it. Staying on top of call center software technology while delivering to customer’s expectations, focusing on agent’s engagement, assigning calls to the right agents, they have a never-ending list of goals accountability.
Great endurance and grace might work to keep agents encouraged and motivated but supervisors need right call center monitoring tools to overcome the challenges they face today.

Call Center Monitoring Challenges

Accuracy of Agent’s Productivity: Supervisors find it hard to analyze the agent’s productivity, their availability in the queue, average call handling time, and resource management when they have to manually monitor each agent.
Managing Call Quality: One supervisor, multiple agents. Supervisors fail to monitor the call quality of each agent and delivering to the needs of customers. Customer feedback is captured during a call, to which supervisors have no access, thus they lose on that data.
Campaign Management: Supervisors take a lot of time to assess the performance of each campaign and distributing calls to the agents in peak hours. They have no control over moving agents from one queue to another queue, thus, affecting the customer experience for customers waiting in the queue.

Call Center Monitoring Tools Help Supervisors Overcome These Challenges

Bird’s Eye View

Get a holistic view of all call center operations on your mobile with Ameyo’s Bird’s Eye View App. Supervisors do not have to log in to their systems to analyze the performance of multiple campaigns. They can easily be notified about SLA breach, call abandoned ratio, and agents’ availability in the queue with a push notification. Supervisors will be happy to know that they can configure the parameters they want to be shown on their screen.
Now, Ron is notified before any SLA breach and he efficiently manages to deliver to customers’ expectations with his agents using the Bird’s Eye View App.

Call Center Quality Monitoring

Supervisors are given control of checking the hang-up details. They can analyze if the call was hung up by agents, customers, or because of the system failure. Supervisors are provided with easy access to recorded calls in Voice Logger and they can analyze the call quality to monitor the agent’s performance anytime.
While training agents in the new batch, Ron can filter the recorded calls and set a parameter for call quality.

Get Insight into Customised Reports

Good news for supervisors, now they can access the customized reports and plan their strategies accordingly. It’s as easy as customizing your pizza toppings, you can get a periodic report with a report scheduler and analyze the performance of different campaigns.
These reports also give them insight into the success rate and easily allow them to manage the resource allocation and setting the pacing ratio resulting in reaching a large customer base.
This helps Ron align his workforce in accordance with the peaks and troughs of call volume.

Quick Check on Real-Time Activities

Let the supervisors snoop, barge, and whisper on a live call without hampering customer experience. They can whisper in to add insights to the customer’s journey when the agent is stuck, this reduces the number of call transfers and increases productivity on a higher level.
Ron feels relaxed when he sees the customer satisfaction score because they can resolve customer queries in one go by better assisting his agents with call whisper functionality.
The challenges are endless when you work in the customer service department and you need to keep a check on the shared goals of the organization. Supervisors can leverage their resources while analyzing call patterns, managing call volume, and allocate idle agents into more productive tasks. A relief to supervisors that we have call center monitoring tools that would enhance their productivity thus adding to customer satisfaction rate.

How to Ace Self-service support with a Helpdesk Software

Are you still in two-minds about whether your business really needs self-service support since you already cater to most of the channels such as an email, voice and even social media to some extent? Well, the answer is simple – Yes and for good reason. Self-service usage increased from 67% in 2012 to 76% in 2014 (Forrester). Which is only going to increase with the changing times. The millennials, also known as the digital natives are tech-savvy and rather comfortable with finding and implementing the solutions on their own – without seeking help.

If we go by this logic, then offering self-service support not just makes sense but is actually the need of the hour. Having said that, how should be the businesses incorporate it into their customer support strategy? By having a help desk software which comes with an array of self-service options.

Let us look at some of the ways to offer self-service support to your customers as well as the agents with helpdesk software.

#1. Customer Portal for Ticket Management

A customer portal is basically the go-to place for customers to request services or raise support tickets. Having an effective customer portal significantly reduces the workload of the agents as the customers are now able to raise a ticket and even follow up on the same using the portal. This in turn also help in improving the brand reputation. To further instill a sense of authenticity and add credibility to the portal, it is always a good idea to align its look and feel according to the overall theme of your brand. Such as using the same color scheme and adding the brand logo.

#2. Chatbot Integration

As per Forrester Consulting, a chat with a live agent can cost $6-12 per interaction, whereas, self-service costs around 25 cents. This sounds like a good reason to go ahead with a bot to answer the simple questions. After all who does not like a good ROI. Integrating with a chatbot will let the customer chat with a bot for the routine queries. And if the bot is stuck on something, the customer can be immediately be routed to a live agent smoothly. This reduces the cost of query handling and also saves the customers time.

Taking it a step forward, natural language processing (NLP) based chatbot runs also performs a text-analysis on the chat history, which can help in identifying the mood of the customer. This insight is particularly useful of the live agent to understand when a customer is aggravated and tweak their ways to handle the situation well.

#3. Updated Knowledge Base

Make a bank of all the relevant documents and other information which the customers can easily access for a better understanding of the product or services. For example, providing detailed documents about the features of the product or user manuals. An effective knowledge base is the one which supports the preferred languages of the customer and thus, bringing in the personal touch.

Building a knowledge base cannot be a one-time activity. One needs to update it regularly with fresh content. At the same time, monitor what the customers are searching for and based on that insight, enrich the knowledge base accordingly.

#4. FAQs and Manuals on Website

A website is possibly the first thing that a customer browses through when they have questions. Having the FAQs listed on the website will help the customers and prospects to quickly go through them and get their questions answered – without having to contact the customer support team. Deciding which questions need to be published should be a well-thought-out and activity. Talking to the inbound executives about the kind of questions that they encounter on a regular basis or analyzing the search pattern of the customers/prospects will help you to shortlist these questions. Along with just viewing the information, the customers should also be able to download the company and product brochures for later use. In the case of high-tech products, having a user manual on the website can further reduce the ticket volume.

#5. Self-service IVR

A well designed Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can offer a multitude of advantages for both, the customers and the agents. You can remove and automate the simple repetitive calls, allowing agents to handle the more complex calls, i.e. those requiring skills beyond the capability of a system and also have the business to be available 24X7. Additionally, integrating the IVR with a CRM and/or the payment gateways further simplify the process and eliminates the need of an agent to some extent without compromising on data security.

For example, a customer calls XYZ bank about their credit card. The IVR will play the menu options. The customer opts to change their debit card PIN. The pre-recorded message will guide the customer on the process of doing that. By following these steps the customer can easily set a new PIN. And since the input is tone masked and encrypted, it is safe and secure.

Conclusion

Customers want fast response to simple, easy questions – without having to wait to talk to an agent. Similarly, the agents would rather avoid answering the same questions day in and day out. Enabling the customer to help themselves is a step in the right direction which will lead to reduced ticket volume and improves customer satisfaction.

How CRM Integration Boosts Agent Productivity?

A happy customer will become a promoter of your brand. But, only a happy agent can drive contextual conversations to increase customer satisfaction, hence a happy customer.

Having said that, we can deduce the worth of investing in your agent’s productivity. Agents are bottlenecked with strict deadlines and have got no time to take a break from their busy schedules. So, how do you take care of your agents?

Integrating CRM with leading applications help agents not only increase productivity but also help them deliver quick service to the customers.

CRM applications can help increase sales by up to 29%, says the recent study.

A CRM Software allows agents to get a holistic view of customer’s details and their buying behavior which helps them maintain the context of their conversation. How about adding some extra time to your agents’ day with automation?

Here’s how your agents can benefit from CRM Integrations:

Single Sign-On

How would you like it if you didn’t have to remember multiple passwords and log in process was just a click away? Automatic two-way synchronization between CRM and your system eliminates the need of entering passwords every time you have to log in.

Now, Katrina does not have to struggle while operating multiple applications, one time signing in will allow her to retrieve the information that she is looking for and she can focus on critical issues without delay.

Drive Contextual Interactions

Do your agents struggle with remembering customer’s details? Of course, they do when they handle high call volume each day. Customer’s interaction history displayed in CRM will help agents understand their journey and pain points. And, once they know the problem, they can drive contextual interaction.

Katrina does not ask repetitive questions from the existing customers. She is aware of the details even before the call is placed because her system is integrated with CRM and she is prepared to solve their queries in one go.

Knock Out Human Error

With bottlenecked schedules, agents fail to deliver consistent service because they are always stuck with manual errors. Reduce the possibility of dialing wrong numbers when you can have a click-to-dial functionality. Agents can dial any number with just one click without manually dialing the number on CRM.

Quick Call Functionalities

While agents are on call, they can transfer the call to other agents and solve customer’s query in one go. Allowing agents with functions like call recording, conference call, and scheduling a call back helps them in resolving the queries quickly. They have the edge of call disposition in CRM to add notes and follow-up with customers.

While Katrina was on a call with her customer, she managed to edit the contact details in CRM without having to go to another screen.

Agents work round the clock and they are the building stones of a business. To initiate a customer first environment, empower your agents with technologies that help them delight the customers. With CRM Integration capabilities, increase agents’ productivity while ensuring that the agents deliver to your business expectations.

5 Tips to be Smart about Customer Support Ticket Management

Are you struggling with your customer support tickets? Are you facing disgruntled customers and unhappy agents? Well, truth be told, you are not the only one. Any business which still has not understood or acknowledged the need of having the right ticketing software is facing these issue. Having the right software eases the burden on the agents and improves their efficiency.

While having a ticket management system is the first step towards exceptional customer support, the story does not end here. Let us look at some ways to be smart about managing the customer support ticket to enhance the agent and customer experience.

#1. Ticket Prioritization

The agents get a lot of interactions in a day. This is particularly true for enterprises dealing with a large customer base. With that kind of ticket influx, it is tiring for the agents to manually pick and choose the tickets while keeping its priority in mind. This process needs to be automated. One way of doing that is by using artificial intelligence. Natural language processing (NLP) for passive channels such as an email or chat makes it is possible to run text-analysis on the customer-agent interaction to understand the sentiment of the customer based on configurable parameters. These parameters further contribute to the heat index which will further help the agents to prioritize the tickets effectively.

For example, a customer who has been waiting in the call queue for more than 2 minutes and was evidently disgruntled in his last email should will be assigned a higher priority over someone, who had a pleasant conversation the last time.

#2. Picking Unassigned Tickets

Having a ticketing software lets the business to auto-assign the tickets to the agents based on configurable parameters. At the same time, to encourage proactive behavior and taking care of low-priority tickets, it is a good idea to allow the agents to pick the unassigned tickets. This will shorten the queue and can also be used as a metric to incentivize the agents as well.

For instance, for a customer support executive, product inquiry tickets will be of low priority. But, if the executive is proactive in picking and resolving these tickets as well, then this behavior should be rewarded with equivalent incentives.

#3. Setting Automation Rules

Design the workflows according to your business requirements using the rule engine based on certain events and/or time lapsed. This is another way to automate the customer support process and make it as seamless as possible.

Event-based Rules: Initiate a set of activities when a pre-defined event occurs and notify the supervisor of the same. For eg., when a new ticket comes in (event occurs), it will e assigned to a queue, the supervisor will be notified and the customer will be sent an acknowledgment mail.
Time-based Rules: Do not miss your SLAs by setting up rules with conditions and actions that will be triggered after a specific time interval for rules with the matching condition. For eg., the time elapsed since the first response on a ticket has been more than the SLA, the ticket will immediately be sent to the escalation queue and assigned to any available agent.

#4. Add Layers to Customer Support Process

Not all customer queries are the same. Similarly, not everyone is equally capable of handling the queries. Having a tiered customer support structure can solve this problem. For instance, having executives with basic product or service knowledge at the first level and the subject matter experts (SME) at the next level. So, if any routine query comes in, the first level executives will be able to solve it quickly. In case of tickets requiring a detailed, in-depth discussion, the ticket can be directly transferred to more knowledgeable resource i.e. a SME for faster resolution.

Having a layered structure will help in the optimal use of the resources. At the same time, it will reduce the ticket handling time and improve the resolution rate. This will eventually lead to higher customer satisfaction.

#5. Provide Self-Service Options

The best way to effectively manage the support tickets is to ensure they are not needed in the first place. If the customer is able to find answers to their problem on their own, they will not need to contact your support department. Empower your customers to resolve the queries on their own. This will de-clutter the support executives dashboard and will help them to focus on high priority cases. Posting the FAQs on your website or using a chatbot to answer the mundane queries are some of the options. In case the query is out of the purview of the chatbot, the interaction can be transferred to a live agent. Another way of achieving that is via a self-service IVR. All these will help in cutting down the queue and resolving the tickets within SLA.

Lastly… It’s Okay to Escalate

Rather than making the customer wait while you struggle to find an answer, it is better to transfer the ticket to your superior who is more capable of handling the query. Do not just pass around the ticket. What’s worse than not knowing the answer? To not accept it and keep stalling. The agents need to be alert and intelligent to identify when and to whom the tickets need to be escalated for a delightful customer support experience.

Must-Have Features in a Good Helpdesk Software

A help desk is a centralized point of contact for the customers to seek support. For that to be a success the businesses need to have a help desk software packed with the right set of features and capabilities. In this article, we will look at some of these features in detail.

Omnichannel Support

The customer can reach you from any channel of their liking and to be a truly loved brand, you need to be available on those channels. Conducting research to understand the preferred communication channels of your target audience can be the first step in that direction. But, for starters, in the millennial age, a business needs to be able to offer customer support across voice, email, social media and chat.

Ticketing Automation

The biggest benefit of having a helpdesk software is to improve efficiency and overall operations. A helpdesk software which automates repetitive tasks is the need of the hour. Create a ticket for every interaction or prioritize them based on configured parameters. At the same time, distribute the tickets to the right queue based on the channel of origin. Additionally, being able to set certain event or time-based rules to trigger a set of actions after configurable time has lapsed or when an event occurs. All these automation mechanisms ease the agent’s workload and improve productivity.

Sentiment Analysis

Understand the mood of the customer using natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the passive media interactions such as an email or chat. Based on this analysis, an emotional state score can be assigned to a particular customer. This along with other parameters such as the status of the ticket, SLA of the ticket, the priority of the ticket and/or the number of unanswered messages can be used for plotting the heat map and thus, helping the agents to prioritize the tickets based on their criticality.

Reporting and Dashboards

Consumption of data needs to be simple yet effective. Good helpdesk software provides a un-cluttered view of the relevant metrics for faster decision making. Along with live monitoring of the operations, it is important to get reports as well. And not just getting the default or basic report, the true testament of any good helpdesk software is to allow the fetching of customized reports for insightful actions.

Easy CRM Integration

Getting a helpdesk software requires investment – financially as well as in terms of infrastructure and workforce training. Thus, you need a help desk software which easily integrates with any of your in-house systems. At the same time, it should also be able to integrate with all the major CRMs at the least. The cherry on the cake will be a complete helpdesk software powered with ticket management.