Tollring CEO Tony Martino says the latest cloud-based contact centre tools and key areas of CCaaS innovation are the next big opportunity for comms resellers.
Here, he outlines why resellers need to adopt a consultative role to be part of this fast expanding market.
The exciting thing about CCaaS is that it makes call centre functionality accessible and affordable to all types of organisations. It is particularly beneficial to mid-market organisations with around 150 to 350 employees. This size of business tends to have multiple customer facing teams using the phone for support, sales, account management, retentions and cancellations as well as outbound telemarketing.
With teams now working from a mix of home and office, CCaaS in the cloud has become invaluable. The ability to visualise customer information is especially relevant for the mid-market enterprises that want to de-risk their business and deliver services from an ‘anywhere’ perspective. CCaaS is all about that. It delivers the flexibility to scale the number of agents as a business grows or contracts; and with the same CCaaS technology available throughout the sales operation a business can resource more effectively, perhaps switching an outbound telesales team to support inbound calls when it’s needed. Like everything in the cloud, CCaaS is used on a per user per month basis, so a business can easily stop or adopt licences as required.
CCaaS represents lots of different services. It is not just about a contact centre receiving and making calls. It can include the supervisory functionality, the agent capability, CRM integration, the added analytics, call recording and sentiment analysis. With the current high customer demand for all of these tools, resellers need to look at how they can provide as seamless and as simplified a customer experience as possible.
The aim is to minimise the fragmentation of tools and services provided to a customer. If a reseller can achieve this, the customer can reduce management and training costs. In contrast, a business with fragmented capabilities can lead to poor a user experience which in turn leads to unhappy staff and potentially unhappy end customers.
With teams now working from a mix of home and office, CCaaS has become invaluable
The effects of a good customer experience are tangible. The return on investment is not just about increasing orders and financial returns. It also encompasses the softer elements such as wellbeing, and the significant benefits of a simplified customer journey and a joined-up experience.
Resellers should also consider how CCaaS helps them to increase their ARPU and customer retention. There are numerous up-sell opportunities too. A reseller can take their customer on a journey, solving their current issues knowing full well that as the business changes and grows they can offer further capabilities to complement the portfolio of services. The key is in having the right tools in a portfolio to meet customers’ changing needs. A breadth of complementary services will also make it much more difficult for customers to switch to another provider.
A business needs to understand a customer’s end-to-end journey to see the full customer experience. This means identifying how a customer first made contact, what routes they took, through to the conclusion and the effectiveness of the whole process. Furthermore, interoperability, supervisor and agent integration are vital in a CCaaS solution. Agents need to communicate with each other and with their supervisors in real-time and across different channels.
The supervisor role is vital. They need to understand how things have gone and how to improve, how to manage staff productivity and determine staff levels for different times of the day. And increasingly, agents have their own wallboards to understand what colleagues are doing in real-time. This enables them to share their knowledge and information, as well as collaborate with peers, colleagues, supervisors and managers.
Customer experience analysis from a holistic perspective is another key feature. This dovetails into the more technical elements of APIs and CRMs which empower the customer experience analytics with a greater understanding of their interactions and journeys.
CCaaS has to be easy to sell. By its nature, it can be hugely complex but many of these tools now visualise the provisioning and management journeys to ensure it is easy to deploy. This means the journey for the reseller needs to be seamless too, providing them with full control over those provisioning journeys with the ability to turn on licenses and capabilities for customers when required.
Our experience tells us that it is important to invest heavily in research and development to ensure that journeys for resellers and end customers are as strong as possible. We also prioritise our partner and sales enablement programmes to help resellers develop the skills they need to deliver a consultative approach and become the trusted advisor that their customers need. This dual-focused approach is key to a successful CCaaS proposition that allows partners to widen their addressable market, increase ARPU and reduce churn.