Highlights:
- Ensuring optimal customer experience is a crucial element to the success of a contact center.
- Siloed teams can hinder team efforts to provide customers with excellent caller experiences.
- With the right tools and tactics in place, contact centers can break down these silos and create a more team-centered work environment to provide impeccable customer support and create a happier, more productive workforce.
Customer experience (CX) is at the hub of all successful contact centers. Are your employees collaborating as a team to ensure top-notch customer service?
Since the recent health crisis, contact center CX issues have increased, largely due to higher agent turnover rates. In fact, the rate of agent churn spiked by 46% in 2021 alone. As contact centers continue to build their teams back up and accommodate remote workers, fostering a team environment is crucial. Cross-team collaboration is essential to boost agent engagement and motivation and ensure customers are always happy with the results.
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Here’s why CX should be a team sport and how to create this environment in your contact center.
Industry stats
- Companies with a cross-team approach and customer-centric focus are almost twice as likely to exceed their goals by a significant amount.
- 88% of workers say that disconnected communications negatively impact workflow.
- 42% of customer support agents are unable to efficiently resolve issues due to disjointed systems.
What can be done to create a team environment to improve CX? Try these four strategies:
1. Breakdown communication silos
It’s easy for workers in a contact center to become disconnected with each other, particularly among different departments or with some agents working remotely.
A siloed workforce can hamper collaboration among employees. Ultimately, this can lead further away from customer centricity and hinder customer experience. The goal is to break down these siloes to foster more efficient teamwork and get all workers involved in delivering excellent customer service as a team.
Facilitating better communication among team members enables them to:
- Stay aligned with each other to provide a more streamlined experience for customers.
- Brainstorm on ways to resolve issues and tackle certain tasks.
- Learn varying customer success strategies from experienced fellow agents.
Choosing the right communications platform for your contact center makes it easier to break down silos and foster collaboration. Look for a solution that provides your agents with a centralized dashboard that allows cross-channel collaboration and communication.
2. Create opportunities to involve the entire team
Some employees may feel out of the loop, particularly those who work remotely and aren’t physically present with onsite agents. For this reason, it’s crucial to create opportunities for all team members–even those who work off-site–to get involved in various projects and initiatives.
Whether it’s training, brainstorming solutions, or even party planning, getting everyone involved can create a more cohesive workforce and make everyone feel connected to the company’s mission and goals. Ultimately, getting all agents on the CX train makes customer experience a team sport.
3. Connect branches with contact centers
Your contact center may have a front office that tackles front-end calls and communications, along with a team of agents working in the main contact center. In this case, both agents and front office employees work in tandem to help ensure excellent customer service, especially when call volumes spike. A seamless transfer between branches and contact centers can optimize the handling of overflows.
4. Modernize your technology
The right communications platform can mean the difference between a siloed team and a cohesive one. Leverage digital technology to create a more collaborative team environment that fosters effective communication and engagement among agents.
RingCentral Team Messaging, for instance, is a team collaboration solution that helps contact centers organize and centralize team communications. It can be used to create interactive messages and allow users to enter information directly into a message.
Contact centers can also use RingCentral tools to build customized conversational bots to serve as automated agents. These bots can be useful for sending private notifications and automating interactions. RingCentral offers several bot frameworks to help create bot applications.
RingCentral’s contact center solution can also be integrated with project management tools to manage and assign tasks, send notifications when tasks are completed, create and share events and due dates, and create and share meeting notes.
Ent and Allergy uses RingCentral Video to build remote-team chemistry
America’s largest ENT, Allergy and Audiology Specialty Practice uses RingCentral Contact Center to offer a world-class patient experience. ENTA’s call-center department is also finding ways to improve its operations.
“We’ve started hosting themed Happy Hours using RingCentral Video, where we have our agents—who are all remote now—get to know each other. The theme might be travel, and we’ll talk about places we want to visit, or it might be about our favorite foods or wines. We’re finding it valuable for bringing the whole team together and building a strong culture, especially while we operate as a remote workforce.”
ENTA is finding that video calls can be valuable for creating chemistry and a sense of teamwork—which has direct benefits on the team’s effectiveness at collaborating.
Originally published Jul 20, 2022, updated Oct 26, 2022