How to Deliver Winning Customer Experiences With Modern Contact Center Tech

The technology’s limitations spurred the organization to invest in a solution from RingCentral that integrates well with existing applications, allows agents to remotely log in to call queues and ultimately helps the team better serve its fans.

In the past, call centers in the business world were often characterized by high turnover, low success and a generally grim work environment. But technologies from vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, Five9 and others are giving companies the tools they need to assess contact center operations, leverage automation, and improve management and training.

Tech solutions can help companies to manage costs in the contact center without sacrificing the customer experience, says Max Ball, a principal analyst at Forrester: “Omnichannel capabilities that can meet customers on their preferred channels instead of forcing everyone to call in are key.”

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How to Track the Customer Journey

Jeff Katzin, a partner at Bain, says that half or more contact center inquiries are made by customers seeking basic information, something that can now largely be handled through automation. But when tech solutions are clunky, he says, customers will quickly sour. “When you force a customer to switch channels — if they’re trying to do something digitally and it doesn’t work, so they have to call in — we see net promoter scores drop in half, because you’re asking customers to do more work to resolve their issue.”

Since moving to RingCentral, the Magic have seen improvements in average queue time, time to pick up calls and time to resolve calls, metrics that the team previously had difficulty even tracking.

“We all know that no customer wants to sit in a queue listening to music or messages over and over,” Lutes says. “We’ve definitely been able to tighten things up and gain a lot more satisfaction in our customer base.”

Customer service representatives often travel from the team’s offices to its arena on game days to meet with season ticket holders. Prior to the switch, these employees could forward their work phone lines to their personal cellphones, but they had no way of differentiating work calls from personal ones.

Today, they have RingCentral softphones on their cellphones and laptops, allowing them to fire up the contact center app from the arena or when they’re working from home.

RingCentral integrates with other important technologies that Magic employees use, particularly Microsoft Dynamics, allowing the team to automatically create and track customer interaction records.

“We have a much clearer view of ongoing communications with each customer,” Lutes says. “We can track voice, email and text, so we get a holistic picture of the customer journey. That was really important to us.”

Modern Contact Centers Reduce Hardware Costs

SEKO Logistics, a leader in end-to-end global logistics, is headquartered in Schaumburg, Ill., receives up to 700 calls a day from customers seeking updates on and assistance with their shipments.

The company transitioned from an on-premises communications system to a cloud-based system by 8x8 to simplify its contact center requirements, improve reporting and reduce hardware costs.

“The contact center is an integral piece of our business strategy,” says Ilyas Yezdani, lead field services engineer for SEKO. “Customer service is one of the most important aspects of a business, and it is often overlooked.”

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Yezdani emphasizes the ability of modern contact center solutions to help companies set targets for contact center performance and then track key metrics over time. Jason Garcia, SEKO’s corporate cartage manager, notes that 8x8 seamlessly integrates with its Microsoft Teams environment, eliminating the need for agents to toggle back and forth between different applications as they attempt to resolve customer issues.

“Teams is our primary platform for communication and collaboration, and this integration streamlines our workflows,” Garcia says. “Employees can continue to manage everything within Teams. That enhances efficiency and simplifies the user experience.”

By eliminating the need to replace physical phones as they age out, he says, the 8x8 system is also saving SEKO hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware expenses.

But even more important, he says, the intuitive dashboard provided by 8x8 is helping employees to better serve the company’s customers.

“It is difficult for a business to thrive without happy clients, and 8x8 has allowed us to personalize the customer experience so that it is quick and efficient,” Yezdani says.

Leverage Automation With a Modern Contact Center

Several years ago, leaders at the supply chain, logistics and transportation company Ryder System, realized that they needed to modernize the company’s legacy contact center. Every time something went wrong with the private branch exchange infrastructure, the company had to pay hundreds of dollars to a vendor to come out and investigate the issue, and customer service agents were spread out across the company’s various rental and -service locations. Depending on the day, there might be a lengthy queue at one location while representatives at another sat idle, waiting for calls to come in.

“The old system was getting old and starting to fail,” says David Bartos, senior telecommunications manager at Ryder. “We could see the writing on the wall that something had to change. We had to decide: Do we just upgrade the on-premises systems, or do we move forward with the new technology that’s available and centralize everything?”

The company opted for the latter, adopting RingCentral to handle 45,000 calls a month to more than 600 sites. The move allowed Ryder to centralize its contact center and also provided unprecedented visibility into customer service operations.

“As soon as that customer picks up the phone and dials into a Ryder branch location, they come into the RingCentral cloud,” Bartos says. “From that point, we have full visibility into that call, from how long it lasts to how many times it’s been transferred, how many times the customer has been put on hold and whether it goes to voicemail. We didn’t have that with our legacy platform.”

Ryder has also started to leverage artificial intelligence features in the RingCentral platform. “One important feature is transcription, where the software automatically memorializes a call into a Salesforce record,” Bartos says. “Another is AI-generated next steps for the agent. If you have a new agent on the phone, and somebody calls in to schedule maintenance on a truck, RingCentral can let them know what questions need to be answered during the call.”

The centralized contact center enabled by RingCentral has freed up branch employees to focus more squarely on their most important tasks, Bartos says.

“We have a lot of extremely talented people, and they don’t need to be answering the phone and tracking down trucks,” he says. “The centralized contact center lets us leverage the economies of scale.”