Without question, the contact center has become an integral part of the modern business. It’s where brands manage the customer experience—and through that, it’s how they compete in an increasingly consumer-first marketplace.
Therefore, contact center technology is key to making the most of every customer interaction. The only problem? Not all contact center solutions are the same. Pick the wrong one and you not only risk losing resources, but customer loyalty, too.
So, choosing a platform can make or break your success. Whether it be inbound customer inquiries or outbound calls, you need a solution that fits your specific needs. In this guide, we’ll explore the essential contact center capabilities you should consider when making this all-important decision.
Contact center capabilities you need to succeed.
1. Omnichannel support
Today’s consumers use three to five channels to interact with brands. For example, the average person switches between websites and mobile channels nearly six times before finally booking a hotel reservation.
However, maintaining a seamless customer experience across multiple channels isn’t easy. Without integration, you risk adding unnecessary friction to the process, which can frustrate and drive away consumers.
That’s why businesses need omnichannel contact center solutions. An omnichannel channel center makes customer communication more flexible, letting people choose how they interact with your brand. It allows agents to field customer inquiries no matter where they occur, whether via phone, email, live chat, social media, or SMS. Not only does this give consumers a better experience, but agents don’t have to jump between disparate channels to address customer needs.
Imagine someone engages customer support to resolve an issue. They start with a live chat, but their case requires human interaction, so they call the contact center. Rather than agents asking the caller to repeat themselves, an omnichannel solution can retain contextual customer information and display it in the agent’s dashboard. Plus, they can access historical data, like past interactions or sales histories, for further reference.
The result? A frictionless handoff between chat to phone call without skipping a beat.
2. Intelligent routing
How you distribute incoming calls and cases can significantly impact how the interaction goes. If you send callers to someone ill-equipped to handle their needs, it makes for a negative customer experience. Plus, the interaction will take longer, which makes your contact center less productive.
Enter intelligent routing and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD). Rather than route incoming calls randomly, they use advanced techniques like artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline and optimize the process. For instance, with skill-based routing, the ACD can match customer inquiries to the most suitable contact center agents.
This minimizes the chance of a bad interaction and sets the agent up for success. If an agent is busy, Automatic Call Distribution will simply send the case to another who can handle the problem. Better yet, if someone calls back due to a dropped call, the platform can reroute them to the same agent.
Today’s AI-powered contact center solutions take intelligent routing even further. With Webex Contact Center, you can leverage channel routing that optimizes itself based on topic, customer sentiment, capacity, and agent conditions.
3. Customer journey intelligence and orchestration
Consumer expectations are constantly changing. Consider this:
- 81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience.
- 70% say it’s important that employees know who they are and their history with the company—past purchases, buying patterns, customer support calls, etc.
Contact center technology must evolve to meet these needs, and this is where customer journey intelligence becomes essential. By leveraging comprehensive customer data, contact center software equips agents with detailed context about each individual’s interaction history and challenges, allowing them to adopt a more informed and personalized approach.
By offering a holistic view of customer behavior—whether they abandoned a cart, faced a website issue, or previously spoke to support—agents can address issues faster and recommend solutions that fit the customer’s journey.
But why stop there? With Webex Contact Center, you can design and manage customer journeys with a low-code, no-code flow builder. That means you can map out tailored experiences and automate every step, from initial customer engagement to resolution.
For example, customers might enter through a chatbot, progress to an agent for more complex issues, and receive a follow-up survey—all seamlessly aligned with their needs and preferences. Best of all, because there’s no technical expertise required, you can do this without burdening IT resources.
4. Workforce optimization tools
Agent performance is key to customer satisfaction, but a traditional call center solution doesn’t offer nearly enough visibility for supervisors to monitor agents effectively. Fortunately, those days are over.
Now, with the right platform, quality assurance and workforce management are simple, streamlined processes. Managers can access automated call transcripts to ensure script compliance or listen live and intervene if necessary.
By monitoring and measuring agent performance, whether it be at a high level or on a granular basis, supervisors can identify potential areas of improvement to provide better customer service. Workforce optimization tools also help managers plan operations. For instance, advanced forecasting and adaptive scheduling can help ensure the contact center has an appropriately sized staff for peak demand.
Critically, managers can use artificial intelligence to pull top-rated calls automatically, allowing them to identify best practices for future training purposes.
5. Predictive dialer
A predictive dialer streamlines outbound calling, automatically dialing numbers and only connecting agents once someone answers a call. This automation significantly boosts agent productivity by reducing downtime and enabling them to focus solely on live interactions.
For contact centers that rely on proactive outreach, such as sales or collections teams, predictive dialing maximizes outbound call efficiency and drives higher customer engagement. The time savings mean agents can achieve more within their shifts, ultimately contributing to better results and a smoother customer journey.
6. Virtual agent self-service
A virtual agent is an AI-powered tool designed to interact with customers and assist with tasks through automated conversations. Equipped with natural language processing and machine learning, virtual agents can understand, interpret, and respond to customer inquiries in real time, often mimicking human conversational patterns.
Their primary use case? Customer self-service. Today’s contact center software isn’t complete without text- or voice-based self-service technology, such as:
- Conversational AI chatbots: These virtual agents use AI to understand and address customer needs in a way that feels human, providing quick answers and solutions without waiting for a live agent. By automating routine interactions, chatbots help manage call volume, enabling agents to focus on more complex cases while offering customers a fast, convenient way to resolve common issues.
- Interactive voice response (IVR): IVR systems guide callers through automated menus to help them reach the appropriate resources quickly. Through advanced speech recognition, these virtual agents can interpret spoken responses, route calls effectively, and answer frequently asked questions. IVR systems enhance self-service by allowing customers to resolve issues independently, thus reducing wait times and making the experience more efficient.
According to a recent Cisco survey, self-service tools are highly effective, especially for organizations that fully embrace AI:
- Leading AI adopters saw customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores improve by 92% with AI self-service, compared to laggards with less than 50% improvement.
- 84% of AI leaders used AI to reduce hold times, while AI laggards saw no reduction.
With an advanced contact center solution, you can even leverage AI to identify the most common reasons people contact your support center. This empowers you to gather insights and optimize these self-service resources to meet customer needs and shorter resolution times.
7. Voice analytics
Voice analytics, especially when paired with sentiment analysis, is a powerful contact center feature. It helps decode a customer’s emotional tone during an interaction, allowing teams to better understand how or why it was positive or negative.
This feature does more than simply record customer conversations—it analyzes the tone and nuances of their speech, identifying emotions such as frustration, satisfaction, or confusion in real time. This capability is incredibly valuable as it allows agents to respond with greater empathy and tailor their interactions to the customer’s emotional state. For instance, if the sentiment analysis picks up on frustration, agents can focus on calming strategies, whereas positive sentiment may suggest a quicker, more seamless interaction..
This insight not only improves the quality of each conversation but also provides actionable data for training and quality assurance. Managers can use this data to identify areas where agents may need support, uncover patterns in customer pain points, and spot trends that help refine customer experience strategies.
8. AI-powered agent assistance
Agent assistance is one of the most transformative contact center capabilities available today, delivering real-time guidance and relevant information directly to contact center agents during customer interactions. Using AI, it can instantly pull knowledge base articles to help agents intelligently address issues with speed and confidence.
That way, agents don’t have to spend time digging for resources or finding answers. Why? Because they’re already at their fingertips. Plus, agents can dedicate more time to actively listening to and engaging with the customer.
Of course, generative AI takes agent assistance several steps further. For example, Webex Contact Center leverages generative AI to power two unique capabilities:
- Suggested responses: This Webex Contact Center feature generates replies based on the context of the conversation. With relevant, tailored suggestions, agents can reduce response times and improve the consistency of their answers. This support not only minimizes the cognitive load on agents but also enhances the customer experience by ensuring replies are both precise and personalized.
- Conversation summaries: Automatic conversation summaries capture and consolidate key details from each chat or call, allowing agents to quickly review the interaction history without requiring customers to repeat themselves. Whether it’s a chat with a virtual agent, a call that got disconnected, or a conversation involving multiple agents, these summaries provide a clear, concise recap of each customer’s journey. This feature is especially valuable when customers transition between virtual and human agents, as it preserves context and ensures continuity.
9. Unified communication and collaboration tools
Integrated collaboration tools are essential for a modern contact center, as they seamlessly connect agents with knowledge workers and other departments, creating a more agile and responsive support environment. When a contact center solution integrates with widely used collaboration platforms—whether that be Webex Calling or Microsoft Teams—agents can easily reach out for information, seek assistance, or coordinate with teams in real time, all within the same interface.
This integration minimizes time lost to switching between platforms and reduces the delays that often arise when agents need input from other departments to resolve complex inquiries. With instant access to subject-matter experts, agents can deliver faster, more accurate responses, enhancing both the speed and quality of customer support.
10. Real-time and historical reporting
Data-driven insights are vital for contact center managers aiming to optimize daily operations and long-term performance. With access to historical and real-time metrics, such as call volume, average handle time, and customer wait times, managers can quickly identify patterns and address operational challenges as they arise.
Real-time insights allow managers to make immediate adjustments, such as reallocating resources during unexpected call spikes or offering additional support to agents handling high call volumes. This responsiveness ensures that service quality remains consistent and that customers experience minimal wait times, even during peak periods.
Historical reports, on the other hand, provide a comprehensive view of performance trends over time. By analyzing these insights, managers can identify recurring issues, such as increased call volumes during certain seasons, or track the impact of workflow changes. This data empowers managers to make informed, strategic decisions, like refining training programs, optimizing staffing schedules, and improving response protocols, all of which can enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the overall customer experience.
11. Open architecture
Did you know that 75% of businesses have as many as 10 disparate customer data systems? It’s true—and worse yet, siloed data can significantly hinder contact center performance. Organizations with disparate customer data systems have 48% longer resolution times and 50% lower CSAT scores than others with connected platforms.
That’s exactly why your contact center software must be highly compatible with the rest of your technology stack, especially customer relationship management (CRM) systems. CRM integration ensures data flows seamlessly between business applications, providing agents with updated customer information. Also, it reduces context switching, ensuring teams can access data from one dashboard.
Ideally, your solution should offer a suite of developer resources, like application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits, documentation, and support services. Open APIs and other tools make it easy for developers to integrate, customize, and enhance platform functionality. Critically, they also enable teams to innovate AI-powered solutions tailored to their business needs.
12. Centralized management
With a “single pane of glass” dashboard, contact center teams can manage, monitor, and troubleshoot systems in real time. By having all essential functions accessible from one place, they can quickly identify and resolve issues, ensuring minimal downtime and maintaining smooth operations.
A centralized solution with easy administration also provides end-to-end control over security, compliance, and user access, which is crucial for safeguarding sensitive customer data and meeting regulatory standards. Also, customizable, widget-based desktops allow agents to tailor their workspace to fit their unique workflows and preferences. This flexibility not only enhances productivity but also improves agent satisfaction by providing a setup that aligns with individual needs.
Take Control Hub, for example. It’s a comprehensive dashboard where administrators can manage their entire Webex ecosystem, including Webex Contact Center. From here, they can monitor performance, add or delete users, generate reports, and much more.
13. Customer experience management
Knowing how your customers feel isn’t easy, but with the right platform, you can strategically gather information throughout their journey. Post-interaction surveys and customized feedback forms provide direct insights into customer satisfaction and service quality.
By collecting feedback immediately after a customer interaction, whether via text or email, organizations can capture real-time responses while the experience is still fresh. For a more tailored approach, they can use custom surveys designed to match specific interactions, products, or customer segments, making the feedback more relevant and actionable.
In either case, managing surveys within the flow of customer interactions allows contact centers to place them strategically—after resolving complex issues, for example—where responses provide the most meaningful insights. This data-driven focus on improvement ultimately leads to higher customer satisfaction and more agile, responsive support.
14. Agent burnout detection
One of AI’s most important use cases involves agent wellbeing. Stress and burnout are common in the workplace, especially for contact center agents. In fact, agent turnover is twice that of any other profession, with burnout causing 50% of the churn.
Fortunately, AI-driven burnout detection can help prevent turnover—and more importantly, support agent wellness. With Webex Contact Center, you can automatically identify early signs of stress, exhaustion, or burnout. It leverages AI to analyze factors like vocal tone in real time, detecting subtle cues that indicate an agent may be experiencing strain.
This notifies supervisors, who can take timely action to intervene. Whether it be offering a break, providing additional support, or reassigning tasks to lighten the agent’s load, this proactive approach can make a big difference inside and outside the workplace.
15. CSAT score generation
CSAT surveys are an essential tool for gauging customer satisfaction, providing direct feedback on individual interactions, and allowing contact centers to measure how well they’re meeting customer needs. However, these surveys don’t always capture the full picture. Not all customers participate, and even those who do may offer limited responses that don’t fully reflect their experience. This makes it difficult to identify potential issues that weren’t explicitly mentioned.
To bridge this gap, contact centers can use AI-powered CSAT score generation to automatically analyze customer sentiment and conversation transcripts. By examining tone, word choice, and emotional cues throughout the interaction, sentiment analysis detects levels of satisfaction or frustration that surveys might miss. When combined with conversation transcripts, this sentiment data reveals patterns and insights that may go unreported in survey responses alone.
Unlock innovation with Webex Contact Center
Your choice of platform can significantly determine how your contact center performs—and by extension, the quality of your customer experience. The good news? You can find all the contact center capabilities you need in one comprehensive, cloud-based, and AI-powered solution: Webex Contact Center.
At Cisco, we’re constantly rolling out new features to take our platform to the next level. From AI assistance to burnout detection and everything in between, these capabilities empower you to transform customer experience into a tangible business advantage.
Ready to get started? Learn more about Webex Contact Center today.
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