The ultimate goal of every call center is to have a system that makes the customer experience easy, productive, and customer-centric. A company must constantly look for ways to improve the customer’s interaction with the call center platform in order to stay in the game. Good customer service is all about making things easier for the customer.

One of the most challenging things to address — which has a direct impact on the customer experience and the call center’s bottom line — is navigation. Platforms that put a customer on indefinite hold because an agent does not have the experience to handle the issue, or if a customer is handed off numerous times to different agents, wastes the customer’s time and costs the call center money.

The ability of a call center to accurately answer and route calls efficiently is key to being a customer-centric company. Here are a few ways that effective call navigation impacts the bottom line in a positive way.

Improving customer experience

Provide an omnichannel platform where callers are routed to the right person who can attend to their needs in a personalized manner in the minimum amount of time. An omnichannel platform pulls together the calls, chats, emails, social media contacts, etc. into one place so that callers do not have to repeat their concern multiple times to multiple people.

An omnichannel platform works great with an automatic call distributor system, forming a one-stop-shop for callers where all of the communication is managed in one place. With the right software, management can be on the screen with the agent to help with difficult calls. Agents have access to the history of communication, which helps keep information in context and avoid making the customer repeat themselves.

Enabling the agent

Tackling the navigation issue must involve giving the agent the resources they need to solve customer problems quickly, accurately, and efficiently. An advanced customer relationship management (CRM) tool gives agents what they need to handle multiple and complex caller issues, including an integrated knowledge base.

The knowledge base will enable agents to quickly search for related issues and previously solved cases. An omnichannel-configured call center platform has all of these capabilities integrated to help an agent quickly arrive at a suitable solution.

Other solutions to navigation issues

These days, many customers would rather solve problems on their own, so there are great opportunities to help customers help themselves. An effective self-service strategy can help to deflect potential support issues, which lightens the load of a call center agent and eliminates the problem of navigation altogether. Self-service can include an integrated cadre of things such as videos, FAQs, help databases, chat bots, and tutorials.

Making sure your call management system integrates social media is important and helps to make a caller’s experience positive. According to Deloitte, nine percent of customer support contacts in 2019 will be through social media. Social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook can lead a caller to a company’s call center, so having the customer’s information from the initial contact via social media at an agent’s fingertips is extremely helpful.

Other tools that can enhance a caller’s experience include those utilizing artificial intelligence (AI). AI allows customers to get answers questions quickly and accurately.

Helping the bottom line: addressing navigation

The core of navigation solutions centers around a digital world and effective software. All of the data in the world will not help an agent solve a problem if the call was not routed to the correct person or that key data is not available. It’s important to find integrated and omnichannel software to help call center navigation have a positive impact on the bottom line.