Enghouse Interactive’s Jeremy Payne explores how technology is bringing people together
Elly Yates-Roberts |
Businesses are becoming increasingly focused on optimising the customer journey, mapping the way customers interact with them and looking at how to streamline that process to improve the customer experience. They are also handling more routine customer engagements through self-service. The remaining interactions, such as insurance claims or mortgage applications, tend to be complex and require multiple parties to resolve. As such, we are seeing growing use of collaboration environments like ‘sandpits’ or ‘boxes’, and the latest collaboration tools, including Microsoft Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.
Enghouse has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft, building new functionality on top of Skype for Business offerings. We are now working towards shifting those opportunities into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem.
In contrast to the alternatives like e-mail and traditional voice telephony, these kinds of collaboration hubs offer a highly fluid means of communication, ideally suited to customer-facing businesses who want to build a highly responsive, interactive and productive customer service environment.
When used alongside tools like the Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (EICC), Microsoft Teams has the potential to bring contact centre agents greater access to collaborative functionality than ever. For example, it could make it easier to talk to people in the back office while communicating with a customer. It also gives agents the opportunity to share relevant information with colleagues over their mobile, send videos back to the office in real time and get immediate support, no matter where they are working.
These opportunities also have an effect on the contact centre team. It reduces friction in the process and agents know they can rely on the expertise of the wider team and use the latest collaborative technology to get relevant information back to the customer faster. The old saying “the happier the agent, the happier the customer” continues to hold true.
In today’s complex customer interaction environment, collaboration is key to delivering the best possible customer experience. Thanks to the emergence of the latest communication hub-based technologies like Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams, and their role in extending the capability of the contact centre itself, that kind of collaboration is accessible for most businesses today.
Jeremy Payne is vice president of Marketing at Enghouse Interactive