A contact center is a hub for customer engagement. Contact center technologies ensure calls go to the right people and customers feel good about the experience when it’s over. Contact center tools also help salespeople optimize their outbound calls.
The net result: better service and more sales.
For decades, contact center technologies were expensive to buy and complicated to implement — placing them beyond the reach of most small businesses. They required on-premises hardware that was costly and time-intensive to maintain. That’s no longer true today thanks to the rise of cloud-based applications called Contact Center as a Service, or CCaaS. The best CCaaS applications are economical to acquire and easy to install. This makes them a vital solution for any business built on engaging interactions with customers.
Here's a quick look at four ways that CCaaS tools help small business improve their results:
Simplifying and Automating Outgoing Sales Calls
Let’s start with the most fundamental act of revenue generation: the outgoing sales call. Traditionally, salespeople kept a list of people to call manually. A simple-to-use CCaaS application removes friction from these interactions. Leave it to automation — if a call is missed, the system will automatically queue the call for agent follow-up, syncing with existing CMS systems.
This helps salespeople win the numbers game: They get extra minutes and hours to close more deals. Algorithms and automated processes do manual chores that free up time for sales teams.
Taking Customer Service to the Next Level
Personal service gives the edge to SMBs that know their customers well enough to earn their trust. A well-equipped CCaaS application can take customer service from good to great with:
- Automatic, prerecorded messages for voicemail and SMS.
- Call-back queues that prevent callers from getting stuck on hold.
- Multiple channels that let customers choose their favorite format: voice, SMS, video, chat, and social media.
- Data and analytics to take action and improve service.
Large corporations have taken these kinds of services for granted for years. They enjoyed an entrenched advantage because they could afford substantial investments in hardware and software.
Now, any company can deploy these contact center features using one simple app. This transforms the service game, giving an edge to smaller companies that have strong relationships with their customers.
Improving Staff Performance with Call Management
Call management is another fundamental advantage of contact center technology. Managers can do things like:
- Routing calls into queues to improve efficiency and prevent logjams that lengthen hold times.
- Using ring groups that send all calls to a number that rings multiple phones.
- Deploying analytics to identify your most-effective employees and least-productive call practices.
- Creating real-time dashboards for KPIs like talk time, wait time, and employee availability.
Companies that analyze data and optimize business operations have a huge advantage over rivals that ignore these opportunities.
Set Your Business Up for Success
Customer expectations are rising. So are the number of customer interactions and the variety of channels they use to communicate. It’s necessary to arm your customer-facing teams with the right tools and environment to do their jobs in this dynamic, demanding climate.
CCaaS applications make flexible work possible. No longer tied to on-premises systems, employees answer calls and access data from anywhere. CCaaS is also available at half the cost of other solutions, can be deployed in just 24-hours, and is purpose-built for SMBs.
GoTo is enhancing the customer engagement space with a feature-rich and affordable contact center solution. Learn More.