Want to know how it feels to experience rocketing growth and cost savings? Then you must know how it feels to be your customer.

Contact Center Software: Your Behind-the-Scenes Ally

Learning more about how the person on the other end of the customer service call or on the other side of the customer service email feels can be made easier with contact center software. Research suggests customers are more interested in great service than even price, so make customer relationships your special edge.

People Still Want to Talk

Even with smartphones and other technology bringing the Web to everyone’s fingertips, people still want to talk to your people. A Syntellect study said that more than 80 percent of people who participated in the survey want to use the phone for customer service interactions over any other method.

Is Your Contact Center Software on Your Side?

So … how do you keep your team enthusiastic and ready to be the voice on the other end the customer wants to hear? Look closely at how your contact center technology is functioning. Your software should be a teammate, working together with your agents. Look at the basic screen-pop technology you’re using. Is the most relevant, current information popping up when the call comes in? Is it fast enough? If not, customize your screen pops to match your needs to stay ahead of your competition and to help you maintain your frequent and top-buyers, which make up a small but certainly powerful customer segment.

When Things Go Wrong, Things Can Go Right

Some of the most valuable information your contact center solution can help you track happens when a customer encounter goes wrong. Knowing exactly what transpired when a customer is unhappy is information you must have to move forward – and contact center software is designed to give you reports in detail on customer issues. It’s also a way to empower your people, because you can use the info to encourage them to draw on their strengths and empower them to turn future situations like this around.

Merging Up Email and Voice

Another way to encourage your staff and maximize their talent is through making sure your contact center software is able to mesh and streamline online customer service interactions with call center interactions by phone. This is an area many organizations are exploring in more detail, because it can help improve cross-sell opportunities for your call center and your sales staff.

Right Call with the Right Agent

Still, don’t create a situation where your employees are facing too many pieced-out tasks and are not able to focus on areas of strength. Contact center software can help in this arena as well, by providing automated responses that allow your customer needs to be matched with the right agent before the conversation begins. Computer telephony integration is also useful for this purpose and can help calls be efficiently routed. Even if it seems like a big expense up front, it can pay off exponentially with satisfied agents and satisfied customers.

Workforce Management: Contact Center Software Does That, Too

In terms of assisting your management and supervisors with bringing out the best in your people, look for call center software with call monitoring capacity. This delivers into your management team’s hands the ability to analyze new types of challenges that arise and to create the most effective scripts and solutions. The workforce management capacity of your call center software can also be helpful in helping your management pre-plan workloads and rosters based on your agents’ strongest skill sets. (So everybody wins.)

Your People Create Your Best Customers

Call center technology is so much more than a way to get more done, and done faster. It’s a revenue generating machine that helps your people create the kind of customers who will consistently fuel that machine.