Abandon the Status Quo Now: Microsoft Teams Blog #2

Transform the Contact Center with Microsoft Teams (blog series)

Blog #2 Microsoft Teams Drives Agent Productivity

In our first blog, we explored how Microsoft Teams, when integrated into a Contact Center, helps provide a better experience for the end-customer. This blog will focus on how it helps enhance agent productivity.

Providing Quick Access to Information Helps Improve the Agent’s Experience

Contact center agents are now under ever-increasing pressure to treat all callers with speed and accuracy, making customer satisfaction their main objective…while also dealing with each person with appropriate levels of empathy.

The Pressure is On.

In our previous post, under the Helping Customers Help Themselves with Self-Service heading, we alluded to the cross-over benefits for agents that result from Teams enabled applications. Teams complements the contact center resources to help agents provide better levels of service to their customers.

Self-Service Helps Agents Too

While the caller has progressed through the self-service application, relevant information about them and the issue at hand has been captured. By way of the integration of the CRM system with Teams, the customer profile is updated while the call is in process, ensuring that it is current for if/when the call is transferred to an agent. Teams facilitates this process as it ‘pins’ the record or a view of the customer profile to the relevant Teams channel within Dynamics365. This provides agents with an improved experience as they have the info required to resolve the customer issue and can easily share that CRM information with other agents if/when they require support or if they need to escalate to a supervisor. At the same time, a contact center chatbot can “listen in” to the call to monitor how the call is progressing and provide appropriate agent guidance regarding additional customer service solutions.

Ad Hoc and Quicker Access to Expertise

• Microsoft Teams facilitates and simplifies ad hoc communications with people across the organization. Whenever a caller requires support from a specialized department or subject matter expert (SME) they can be quickly connected through Microsoft Teams persistent chat and presence indicators to engage with only those that are available at that moment.
• Better Global Coverage
• Using Teams, experts of all types no longer need to be centrally located. With easy access, they can be geographically deployed, facilitating the delivery of “follow the sun” customer support.

Agents are Experts… A Knowledge Base Ensures They Are

As previously noted, people have become very adept at dealing with online support as their first point of contact…and most prefer it. A properly configured and comprehensive Knowledge Base (KB) can quickly become the “go-to” tool for all inquiries… customer-based as well as internal. An additional benefit is the easy identification of highly referenced documents, which can ensure their prioritization for timely and consistent updates.

Properly configured, a Knowledge Base helps keep agent routed calls to around 40% of all inbound inquiries. However, when exceptional cases arise agents can be provided more specialized product information via the Knowledge Base as well. This information would be hidden from customers (i.e. restricted only to agents). While working through exceptional cases, agents would capture and catalog all relevant information and work with the product teams to develop new KB articles that would then treat that exception as a normal case. This would then result in further reducing the number of inquiries routed to agents.

Keep in mind that the optimal use of a Knowledge Base results in increased agent call durations as they focus solely on exceptional cases, which generally require more work and time to resolve.

Studies have shown that the use of Knowledge Base typically reduces support costs by $1-3 Million for organizations with 500+ seat contact centers, while also helping to improve Customer Satisfaction and NPS scores.

Protect Your Experts with Call Recording and Quality Management

For Contact Centers, the need for call recording is becoming more common regardless of industry. Many industries understand the need for recording customer voice interactions for regulatory compliance, order confirmations or change requests, and even as agent protection against abusive or threatening behavior. When used with Teams, customer profiles are much more comprehensive and can be complemented with information gathered from across other channels. Interactions of all types – voice calls, screens scrapes, and text – are recorded, fully indexed, searchable, and extracts can then be easily exported to email as required.

By integrating the Contact Center with Teams, organizations can significantly improve the service levels they provide to their end customers by ensuring their agents are supported with the best possible tools to meet their needs.

Watch for our next blog in this series, coming in two weeks:

The Collaborative Contact Center, powered by Microsoft Teams:

Seeing is Believing

Register Now Learn more from Robin Gareiss, President and Founder of Nemertes Research about how Microsoft Teams and the Contact Center can benefit your organization in our upcoming webinar: