Do more with more: contact center integrations

WHO YOU ARE

The Contact Center

Your agents are handling the difficult task of trying to please customers, one phone call at a time. Wait, you say, we’re a contact center—not a call center—and our agents are doing more than answering the phone. So much more.

Good-bye misconceptions, and hello reality. The contact center today is a omnichannel hub of customer support, and if it’s hard to blow customer satisfaction out of the water in one channel, then optimizing across multiple channels may feel like an insurmountable task.

WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT

Besides binge-watching episodes of True Detective, that is. (We don’t blame you.) But there’s a lot to think about when it comes to providing omnichannel support. Should you allocate dedicated or blended agents to each channel? How can you forecast for growth by channel, and create a consistent customer experience across channels?

You’re enmeshed in tactical day-to-day operations, walking the tightrope of balancing customer happiness with agent happiness, all the while optimizing for efficiency. Where is that elusive sweet spot where everyone and everything is humming along? An agent’s time on the phone is valuable—are they building relationships with customers or asking annoying, redundant questions? You need data and insight into your contact center to make decisions that will impact productivity, but where can you get this data? What are the right investments that will allow you to save time and do more?

KILLER APP COMBO

Zendesk Support integrates easily with a host of voice and chat services, as well as the apps listed below, which are particularly suited for the contact center. Whether Zendesk is your foundation, or a piece of your customer service solution, the apps and integrations below are a great baseline to help maximize your support. It’s easy one-stop shopping.

Voice Integrations

No matter the level of sophistication of your voice requirements, we have a partner for you. Our voice integrations allow companies to make the most of their voice channel by routing calls to the best-suited agents within Zendesk. Through softphones and screen popups, agents receive the call and a full customer profile and ticket history. But each partner also has their own special sauce: 8×8 is an example of a platform that offers a fully cloud-based contact center with inbound and outbound call center capabilities. Interactive Intelligence does double-duty and offers both cloud-only and on-premise solutions.

But we think all our voice integrations are good choices: Five9, Talkdesk, Genesys, Aircall and RingCentral. Last but not least, Zendesk Talk is a great voice channel—easy to set up and deploy, built natively into Zendesk Support, and you pay only for what you use.

Chat Partners

We don’t want to play favorites here, but we liked Zopim so much that they are now part of the Zendesk family. Their customizable chat widget easily turns conversations into a Zendesk ticket. Chat solutions aren’t one size fits all, though, and we also have the warm fuzzies for: LiveChat, Velaro Live Chat, and Olark live chat.

Zendesk CTI Toolkit

The Zendesk CTI Toolkit gives you the ability to build your own voice/telephony integration(s) into Zendesk.

Zendesk Answer Suggestion 

Zendesk’s Answer Suggestion app offers a faster way to surface content from your knowledge base by analyzing the ticket subject line and suggesting relevant articles from your Help Center alongside the ticket.