The pandemic had contact centres nearly collapsing for a minute there. The overwhelming surge of activity they've been experiencing is a direct consequence of face-to-face communication with clients becoming extremely limited or straight-out prohibited – resulting in contact centres becoming "the new face of the business." With great power comes great responsibility – and customers' service expectations are rising accordingly. This is where the recent Five9 integrations with Microsoft Teams and Zoom Phone, allowing real-time agent-expert consultation, come in.
I spoke with Julian Tiongson, Product Marketing Manager at Five9, to get a deeper understanding of the company's most recently-released integration of the two – the one with MS Teams.
What does it do? How does it work? And how, exactly, can contact centres use it to provide a seamless customer service experience and increase agent productivity?
Real-Time Access to Experts
[caption id="attachment_34697" align="alignright" width="200"]
Julian Tiongson[/caption]
Let's start with "what does it do," then.
Simply put: the integration with Teams breaks down barriers between the contact centre and the rest of the organisation. How? By connecting agents to company SMEs (Subject Matters Experts) directly.
How does it work?
Normally, if an agent lacks the information to answer a customer query – they'd have to place them on hold or call them back at a later time. With the Five9-Teams integration, agents can actually see the presence status of company experts, enabling them to collaborate with them in real-time. This means agents have the ability to call, conference, or transfer in an expert to handle customer interactions in one single UI (User Interface).
What Are the Benefits for the Contact Center?
Traditionally, agents worked with two separate applications: one to handle contact centre inquiries, and another to collaborate with internal SMEs. The applications working independently from one another made it difficult to see which experts are currently available.
