There are many ways to transform your contact centre and gain efficiencies.

Many companies are adding more channels of contact to create an enhanced experience with high customer satisfaction.  Market research indicates that the current best practise for contact centres is a combination of phone, email, self service, and web.

If your contact centre is running separate call-handling groups, then you might consider merging these two groups to take advantage of the economies of bigger contact centres.  You can continue to have call handling groups logically separated, but with the ability for available agents in one area to handle overflow in the other area.

Implementing an IP contact centre can help make your operation more scalable, which means you can enlarge without costly investments in your facilities.  Instead, you can use and manage remote agents – through your IP infrastructure from a single location – as if they were physically sitting in one central office.

You can also benefit from improved agent occupancy by blending work into your contact-handling queue.  A classic example of blending is mixing outbound telemarketing into an inbound sales or service queue.  In this case, you make use of the time agents spend waiting for incoming calls – to do your outbound work.  As a result, your agents are busier (more occupied) overall.  Should inbound volumes increase or spike, your agents can stop making outbound calls while they handle inbound calls.  Other types of work such as email and chat can be blended in as well.

Provide your agents with tools to maximise their efficiency.  By providing screen pops of relevant information, an easy-to-use agent desktop, perhaps soft phone, and the ability to access experts for the tough questions, you can increase the number of one-call resolutions and customer satisfaction.  Having a coach operate on the floor to do 1:1 training can also pay dividends. And, you decrease the overall volume of calls to your contact centre.