Got a two-person team? You’ve got a contact center.

When you read “contact center” or “call center”, what do you think of? The words call to mind a large room filled with rows and rows of desks. On those desks, you might find computers, large, complex desk phones, and perhaps headsets with microphones. The room is loud, crowded with agents, and probably pretty hot. Sounds pretty bad, right?

Well, that picture might have been accurate a decade ago. Nowadays, many call centers run remotely, and are often comprised of much smaller teams. In fact, nearly every business these days has some kind of contact center within their organization. For a smaller company, their call center might be comprised of a five-person support team, handling intermittent calls and live chats from a moderate customer base. 

With the cloud technology offered by our platform, just about any size team can perform as well – or better – than a large traditional contact center.  The right software can save time by streamlining communications, automating daily activities, and bringing crucial customer information to the forefront.

Kara Kizior, one of the all-stars on our Customer Success team, works with organizations to improve their operations via our cloud solutions. We checked with her to learn more about how she empowers businesses to transform their teams of agents into powerful contact centers.

Kara, what would you say constitutes a call center in these days of cloud technology?

I’d say that even if you have a two-person team, don’t sell yourself short…you sure do have a contact center!  

If you are managing even one person who takes client-facing calls, then you are essentially managing that interaction. That means your little team functions like a contact center. Congratulations – bet you didn’t realize you had one!

Adding in a SaaS platform to enhance your call management and collect  data will round out your new-found call center. Automation software like CallTrackingMetrics will help you generate professional reporting, judge lead quality, easily take follow-up actions, and not to mention make your life a lot easier when your teammate takes a sick day, or goes on vacation.

Small teams can function just as effectively with large ones if they’re equipped with the right tools. In fact, don’t just limit yourself to “people”… instead, think “devices”. Remember, you’ve got a phone and a computer on your desk, you’ve got another phone in your pocket, and then you have access to email at work, home, or on the go.

Software like CallTrackingMetrics can communicate with all of your devices simultaneously, so you’ll never miss a call or a communication. Now, your contact center operates 24/7 across multiple channels like text, email, and phone calls. Your team may still only be comprised of two people, but I ask you again: are you a contact center?

Before you worked with us here at CallTrackingMetrics, you managed a call center. How could you have used our platform during your previous life?

Honestly, I wish I had CTM in my previous life as a call center manager. While our platform is great in managing the expected, it’s exceptional at mitigating the unexpected.  

For example, we had a pretty unexpected calamity affect my contact center when a local pizza place published our main phone number on a popular promotion rather than their own.  In that single day, we received over 200 calls from people trying to order pizza!

If I had tools like that offered by CallTrackingMetrics, I could have set up a Smart Router to direct calls from existing clients to my agents, while driving new callers to an IVR to filter out pizza orders. It’s easy to create new IVR menus and use them conditionally based on call criteria, so I could have immediately put together a menu that prompted callers to press “1” for pizza, and “2” for our services!

Other CTM features that would have saved me endless hours of call coaching are Transcriptions and Keyword Spotting. I would have loved to set up a Keyword Spotting rule to look out for callers that said words like “wrong”, and then have those calls prompt an automated email containing a recording of that call. It would have been invaluable to be able to react to problem calls immediately, so that I could be proactive instead of reactive. Imagine getting to resolve issues before management brings them to your attention!