How to Choose the Right Contact Centre Solution

More and more organisations are using professional contact centre solutions to handle their customer communication.

Dedicated contact centre platforms offer powerful features for managing customer contacts, and they aren’t just for international call centres with hundreds of agents. Small customer service teams with a handful of employees benefit from such solutions, too.

But how do you select the right contact centre solution for your business needs?

Here are the key questions you should ask yourself and your provider:

What Are Our Present and Future Requirements?

How do we currently deliver customer service? How will our business evolve and how can a contact centre platform support our growth?

The best solutions are not only scalable but can be expanded with additional functionality as your needs change – from simple voice and email communication to a comprehensive and fully integrated omnichannel solution.

How Quick and Easy Is It to Implement?

You are looking for a platform with fast and straightforward setup, but make sure that your employees will find it easy to adopt, too. Complex solutions require time-consuming training, while an intuitive and simple user interface will save you time and money.

How Responsive Is the Provider?

How quickly will I get help if I need technical support for the platform? Does the provider have a local or regional support team that speaks my language?

Where Is the Data Stored?

Due to security considerations and compliance requirements such as the GDPR, many organisations prefer their data to reside in the EU. Ask where and how the provider stores your data and how their data centres are secured.

How Can We Delight Our Customers?

How good is the customer experience we are providing now, and what do we want to improve? To enable positive interactions, your customer service representatives need fast access to each customer’s records and contact history.

You should aim to connect callers to the right customer service representative straight away and resolve their queries within 24 hours or less. Can your contact centre platform support these requirements?

How Do We Measure Contact Centre Performance?

Advanced performance metrics and real-time reporting allow you to continuously optimise your customer service. Does the solution offer reporting and data analytics to help with decision making and resource planning?

Is the Platform a True Omnichannel Solution?

Your customers want to be able to connect with you via phone, email, webchat, SMS, video, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, with all these communication channels seamlessly linked. Can your platform do that – and more?

What Integrations Are Possible?

For a 360-degree view of your customers and to handle their issues efficiently, you need access to CRM data, your e-commerce system and payment applications, integrated ticketing and more.

Avoid staff having to constantly switch between multiple software applications by making sure that the contact centre platform of your choice supports these integrations.

Until now, small businesses either had to compromise on functionality, or they had to find the budget to afford an enterprise solution.