If you’ve ever called a contact center and heard this on the other line, you’ve probably experienced a certain level of frustration as you repeat your name, account number, personal identification, etc. It’s extremely tiresome, and can ultimately leave the customer feeling undervalued. What if instead we heard, “Thanks for calling in today, Mr. Smith! Is there anything I can help you resolve?” The result? Your customer feels taken care of and walks away feeling satisfied with their experience. Intelligent integration of data is what makes this possible, and it has big payoffs for contact centers and the clients they service.
Intelligently integrating data is the action of pooling data from all systems together, analyzing the data pool, and sending useful information back out to the systems that can utilize it. At Inflow, Implementing APIs (Application Program Interfaces) focuses on intelligently integrating data for all contact center solution systems. And because of this technology, we’re seeing a notable increase in our customer retention.
What API’s can do for you:
APIs allow your call center agents to know the customer before they even answer the phone. This works by creating a central access point for the data to flow to that connects the contact center system to the other systems agents are utilizing. Palitto Consulting Services (PCS) is one of the corporations that specializes in creating the central access point and the APIs required to allow all systems to communicate in an effective and useful way.
The Benefit:
No hassle for the customer. One of the biggest goals for Inflow is superior customer support. In fact, we attribute a large part of our success in customer retention to our customer happiness metrics. Nobody wants to call their customer support agent and spend the first five minutes reminding them who they are. It’s not only inefficient, it’s an outdated way of doing business.
A Credit Union Case Study
The Problem: A large state credit union was facing trouble with authentication for its callers. For every call, the contact center agents were required to verbally authenticate the caller. Not only was this annoying to the callers, but it also required the agents to spend about 60 seconds on this task for every call. The credit union found that this meant about an hour of time was focused on this task per agent, per day. This adds up to a lot of money wasted, but more importantly, it means unsatisfied customers.
The Solution: In an effort to both save time and improve the customer experience, the credit union was looking for a solution. They were ShoreTel customers, and their representative referred the credit union to Palitto Consulting Services to determine if APIs would be able to help. Upon evaluating the needs of the credit union, PCS was able to design, create and implement a complete solution. Now, when a customer calls in, there is an automated authentication before the agent picks up the line. The agent now knows exactly who the caller is before having to ask any questions, saving time and providing an overall better experience for the caller.
The Value: This solution created a very pleased credit union that is now extremely loyal to their system because it provided them with happier customers and a tremendous amount of saved time and money.
How do your clients’ agents answer the phone? If they are asking for account information, your clients could be losing customer loyalty and wasting time. Integrating APIs into the process will increase their customer retention.
But this is only one piece of the puzzle. APIs help call centers make effective use of their call center solutions systems, improve security, enable automation, save time and money, and allow for very specific marketing to their callers.
Ready to upgrade your contact center?
Customer service is a top priority at Inflow. That’s why we offer flexible maintenance and support plans to provide you with around the clock support and frequent system upgrades to keep your system operating at peak performance.
Whether it’s ShoreTel UC support, PureCloud UC support, or Contact Center support, we offer industry leading innovative programs tailored to your needs. Explore our programs here, and stay up to date on all things happening in the industry by subscribing to our Knowledge Base Portal.
About Inflow
Founded in 1997, Inflow is one of the nation’s top Unified Communications and Contact Center consultants in today’s market. Pioneers in cloud unified communications and cloud contact center success, Inflow is the first company to provide contact center consulting and training focused solely on helping you elevate your customer experience.
With over 200,000 endpoints supported under Inflow’s innovative success programs around the world, Inflow built its brand and reputation around providing unrivaled customer support. Inflow is in Mitel/ShoreTel’s top 2% in global customer satisfaction, and quickly acquiring a top spot with RingCentral, Genesys PureCloud and NICE inContact.
By partnering with Inflow, you can expect the highest level of strategic consultation, execution, and optimization available in the industry.
