OneView to connect customers

Business in the travel and tourism industry needs extensive customer interaction and delivering services on time is the key. Better tools are required to cater to requirements of customers and a contact centre solution seems more appropriate to meet and exceed the client’s overall experience.

TT Bureau

Call centres have proved that it was possible to improve customer experience and reduce costs by centralising inbound customer calls into a modern call centre. A contact centre can be thought of the next generation call centre which can handle not only traditional telephone calls, but also other means. Contact centresolutions must allow customer engagement teams to multitask any incoming contact, ensuring optimal customer service and first contact resolution.

Customers say they always prefer travel solutions that offer multiple channels. Thanks to the power of computer-telephone integration that makes it easier to integrate the services used for running your business. This includes phone, VoIP telephone services, live chat, emails, helpdesk, SMS, instant message, CRM tools, script builders, feedback templates or even social networking sites like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Every service is run, developed and maintained by specialists, leaving your business to benefit by their expertise.

Customers expect the information they share with an organisation to be available in another place. All important information including contacts, client histories, performance data, etc. are shared across teams and platforms. This encourages a team to work as a cohesive unit and stay on the same page. Moreover, displaying common goals and key indicators further federates the team. Teams take advantage of collaborative call centre features to help each other during calls. Managers can listen, jump in, or advise their team member without the person on the other line realising it. This is how managers can give their team a hand and support to agents in need, so as to serve the customer better.

For many businesses, these are handled in silos or separate groups, if at all. A state-of-the-art, multi-modal contact centre brings this all together to provide a consistent, seamless customer experience across all communication channels. Contact centre solutions are usually of two types — premise-based and cloudbased. These can be chosen as per the organisation’s needs. Premise-based contact centres operate right in your offices, hardware, software, and infrastructure. Your team takes care of the installation, configuration and maintenance of the entire solution. Maintenance can be outsourced, if required.

Cloud-based contact centres work on the software hosted in the cloud by a service provider. Users can employ a computer or smartphone with an internet connection to access the service. Cloud-based virtual contact centres differ from premise-based ones because the upkeep is the responsibility of the service provider. Hence, users can easily focus on running their own businesses.

Specific modules for different roles can increase visibility and boost productivity. For example, a personal dashboard for agents to displays their own metrics, such as contacts handled, as well as overall queue statistics such as contacts in queue and longest wait can help an agent to analyse his productivity and improvise work flow.

A supervisor module which can monitor the overall activities of a group and also drill-down statistics of each agent will help supervisors to manage agents. Another possibility is CRM profiling which allows supervisors to make informed decisions about prioritisation. Supervisors can have full visibility and control of their agents with configurable thresholds to alert them of potential problems.

Apart from it, both live web chat and call back can help businesses not to miss out any potential leads visiting their website or portal. This is especially useful for B2C travel industry. The solution may also support multiple concurrent webchat sessions, providing agents quick links to canned responses, attachments and links to improve customer response times. As an alternative to inbound contact queues, contact centres may also support ‘call me back’ queues, where the customer’s details are queued to an agent, who then initiates the callback with a single click.