Modern Contact Centers Revolutionize Customer Service

Companies have been moving their phone systems to the cloud for years. But with the recent addition of AI features, these tools are better equipped than ever to help businesses ensure call quality and improve customer satisfaction. Max Ball, principal analyst at Forrester, notes that businesses are increasingly using AI in the contact center to summarize interactions, analyze calls for sentiment and topic, assess quality, and assist agents by providing suggested answers and action steps.

“When modern, AI-driven customer self-service applications are in production in significant quantities, we will see real change in the market,” Ball says.

GO DEEPER: Why is customer service the focus of most digital transformation projects?

Dialpad Integrations Make Management Easy

Austin FC has taken advantage of the ability to integrate Dialpad with its Microsoft and Salesforce environments. Fannin’s team can easily add a new user simply by assigning a license from within Dialpad, and the user’s account is automatically tied to their Microsoft credentials. Dialpad also produces call transcripts automatically and enters the notes into customer account records.

“With our previous system, there was no integration, so you would have to type in the call notes,” Fannin says. “Agents would try to remember the details and the reason for the call, but things would get lost. Now, they don’t.”

The Dialpad system features keyword prompting, automatically showing representatives information relevant to the call. “If somebody says, ‘I want to talk to you about amenities at the stadium,’ you can have a document pop up for the sales rep,” Fannin says. “If someone asks, ‘Tell me the cheapest ticket in the stadium,’ it’ll pull up a map with different pricing tiers. It gets people up to speed more quickly.”

The system also provides a sentiment rating, which can help inform training, or even allow supervisors to jump in and save a call that is headed in a negative direction, Fannin says.

The move to softphones, Fannin says, meant the organization “didn’t miss a beat” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it also provides ongoing benefits. “It allows our group to work from anywhere, and it also gives callers the flexibility to speak to our representatives either via voice or text.”

How RingCentral Improves Response Time

For personal injury law firms such as The Husband & Wife Law Team, simply answering the phone is a mission-critical task.

“Response time is most critical in our competitive industry,” says Joe Phelps, intake director for the firm, which operates in Arizona and New Mexico. “You can see all the billboards up and down the highway, and if a live person doesn’t pick up the phone, the client may call the next one if they don’t really know your brand.”

The Husband & Wife Law Team monitors every call to ensure it is answered by highly trained specialists, with agents available around the clock to manage thousands of inquiries each month. The firm adopted RingCentral solutions between 2022 and 2023, drawn by the vendor’s cloud-based tools and comprehensive reporting capabilities. The firm is using the RingEX business phone system internally, while deploying RingCX in its contact center.

UP NEXT: Learn why customer experience technology is vital for hybrid work. 

The auto-answer feature of RingCX had an immediate impact. Initially, Phelps says, contact center agents were reluctant to give up control of when to answer, but they came to “love” it. “The agents are not given an option whether to pick up the phone,” he says. “It just drops into their headset. Now, as soon as a call comes in, the client is there. Before, we had people multitasking and scrambling to get over to the call, and it would ring over to the next agent. We eliminated that with auto-answer.”

RingCentral’s AI features allow the firm to assess all recorded calls for quality assurance. “Before, we were spinning our tires and spending twice as much time on fewer calls,” Phelps says. “Now, instead of combing blindly through a recording, we can get a sense of what they talked about and how the client felt in just a few minutes.”

How 8x8 Improves Employee Experience

The Altoona Curve, a Double-A minor league affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, receives only around 100 calls on nongame days. But when the team is playing, that number quadruples. And when it’s raining, 600 to 700 people might call the team — many simply to see whether the game is still on.

So, when the Curve moved away from its old phone system several years ago, the team needed a flexible, scalable solution. “Baseball is a little bit different, because we play pretty much every day,” says Nate Bowen, the Curve’s general manager. “On game days, our salespeople are here from early in the morning until the end of the game.”

By transitioning to a cloud-based telephony and contact center system from 8x8, the team is able to let sales representatives work from home when the team has the day off. “Before, if you had a client who was supposed to call you, the only way for you to get the call was to physically be here,” Bowen says.

The 8x8 system also added text messaging, click-to-dial functionality and voicemail transcription. And the system keeps track of analytics including call duration, voicemail length and outbound activity, which helps the team with training. For instance, Bowen says, if a sales representative has a large number of short calls with no sales, managers can provide coaching about how to keep conversations going.

After the Curve made the switch to 8x8, the team immediately began receiving text messages from fans — even before the team announced that texting was an option. And Bowen says the system requires minimal maintenance, since 8x8 pushes out automatic updates. But the most important benefit, he says, has been the impact on staff.

“That was primarily why we switched,” Bowen says. “We wanted to give our people time back outside of the office while still allowing them to communicate with clients.”