Here’s Our Formula for Contact Centre Maintenance

Maintenance on the whole is not new – any software company sells maintenance of its products to ensure customers have the technical support and regular upgrades they need to keep the business running smoothly.

Contact centre software and solutions are no different.

Effective support guarantees system uptime and delivers access to the latest product innovations, which greatly increases the knowledge and capabilities available to contact staff and delivers strategic insight to advanced operations of the solution. This results in more planned, predictable support costs and increased operational efficiency, and protects the CX investment over the long term.

About four years ago, we revamped and redesigned our maintenance offering to reflect specific requests, recommendations and feedback from our customers, and we believe that we have achieved a working formula for ensuring Genesys solutions are not only maintained, but improved over time.

In the past we had one basic offering, but during the redesign, we looked at what our customers wanted, and discovered that a more flexible, market-driven and collaborative system of care would make us more responsive and give our customers more choice and control.

Once this overhaul was completed and our customers were introduced to this new approach to Genesys Care, there was a significant impact on customers and their contact centre staff, who were more in control and better equipped to serve their own customers in turn with a maintenance system tailored to their organisational needs.

So, how did we achieve it?

The truth is that it’s an ongoing process. We’re continually refining our offering and making changes and improvements to our Genesys Care services according to the evolving needs of our customers, which shift rapidly to keep up with customer preferences.

With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of the essential elements that make up Genesys Care:

Contact centre maintenance requires collaboration

As well as being a time to showcase the success of our customers, our global G-Summit and G-Force events are a listening period for Genesys Care, during which we ask what customers want and need next as well as what we could be doing better now. Based on what we learn at those events, as well as regular cycles of feedback, we make real changes.

Following consultation with our customers, we introduced app-based chat functions for all of our Genesys Care customers so that they could ask questions and get support in their preferred method. Chat is quickly becoming a stalwart of any contact centre channel strategy, and it’s certainly the case with our maintenance offering. We also added a more substantial file transfer tool that allows our customers to share documents, and us to send downloadable resources and files that will help client-side technicians to resolve issues or access information quickly. What we gained from these introductions were closer ties and better communication with our customers and, crucially, a better, more collaborative way of delivering maintenance and support.

We focus on contact centre knowledge and skills

There is a strong link between the knowledge and skill base of contact centre staff and the success of a CX strategy. At Genesys we approach developing the knowledge and skills of agents in a number of ways from start to end – not just during maintenance – but given the natural cycles of growth and attrition in staff across most businesses, it makes sense that we incorporate knowledge and skill-building as a regular part of our services.

As a matter of policy, we expedite hands-on knowledge transfer with a robust collection of resources, including technical and troubleshooting workshops, to help our customers adopt additional features and minimise the time and effort spent identifying and resolving known issues.

At least once a year as part of our Premium Care offering, our customers send their staff to us for training to build up or refresh their knowledge of our systems and to allow engineers to learn how to troubleshoot their systems and become in-house experts.

We provide flexibility and control

Maintenance requirements vary hugely across different industries – what works for one will not work for all.

In some sectors where the contact centre has only a small function, a new system will require the very basic maintenance and will be fit for purpose for a decade. In other, more competitive, markets where new channels spring up overnight and company reputation and customer experience go hand-in-hand, then maintenance is mission-critical and needs 24/7 year-round support. For Genesys to provide services to meet the needs of both of these customers we needed to be flexible, and so we adapted to allow customers to choose from a menu of options to create a level of care that feels bespoke.

Without proper support and maintenance, businesses that suffer outages in their contact centres can lose more than £30,000 per hour until the problem is fixed. At Genesys Care, it’s our role to inform and guide customers to create a system that aligns with their needs across technology, operations and the workforce. Thanks to our customers, we have been able to develop best-practice customer support systems based on their changing needs, and through that dynamic process we hope to continue growing in success as partners.