Five ways to simplify and enhance your contact centre

By Marie-Josée Thompson, Senior Manager, Technical Product Management – Contact Centre Solutions

Contact centre solutions are becoming increasingly complex to manage as they evolve with cutting-edge CCaaS and AI technologies. In my experience designing, deploying and managing contact centre solutions for organizations across Canada, I see the challenges they face in trying to handle everything in-house.   

From staffing needs to juggling cloud and on-premises solutions – not to mention keeping pace with AI – many companies find it increasingly expensive and logistically difficult to manage their own contact centres. In these situations, organizations benefit from a reliable partner who can simplify contact centre operations and deliver exceptional experiences for both customers and agents. 

Why should you consider managed services for your contact centre? 

By partnering with an external expert, you gain access to the skills and resources needed to keep your systems running smoothly and efficiently. Managed service providers (MSPs) bring a wealth of experience and highly trained professionals to the table. Their expertise can help you: 

• Optimize technology: Ensure your systems are always up-to-date and performing at their best. 
• Maximize performance: Track key metrics and identify areas for improvement, leading to better customer experiences. 
• Drive continuous growth: Stay ahead of the curve with the latest trends and technologies, allowing your contact centre to evolve and thrive. 

Ready to see the benefits of managed services firsthand? Let's explore how they can transform your contact centre operations. 

1. Optimize your cloud solutions 

Cloud-based contact centres offer incredible functionality and flexibility, especially with the rise of AI-powered features that enhance both agent and customer experiences. However, pinpointing the source of a problem can be a challenge. Is it a cloud platform outage? A configuration error? Or something else entirely? 

By taking control of your contact centre, an MSP can quickly isolate the problem and focus on a solution, eliminating the need to waste time determining where the fault lies. This is particularly important after cloud platform updates, which can sometimes have unforeseen consequences on other systems integrated with your contact centre. 

An MSP can also significantly streamline your operations by setting up and configuring automations. For instance, imagine a company with hundreds of locations nationwide needing to adjust their IVR options. A managed service provider can automate this process, completing the update in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. 

2. Embrace flexibility with hybrid and multi-cloud solutions 

A hybrid or multi-cloud contact centre offers the flexibility of the cloud while retaining some data on-premises. However, this approach introduces added complexity. Today's contact centres typically integrate various components, including phone systems, online contact systems, customer relationship management (CRM) software and chatbots or other automated solutions. These components often originate from multiple vendors. 

A managed service provider offers comprehensive visibility into all these solutions, leveraging their experience in contact centre operations. This enables them to effectively manage the entire stack, including monitoring and managing the application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect and integrate these components. 

3. Gain a competitive edge with AI  

Companies increasingly leverage AI solutions to enhance efficiency, personalize services and more. However, deploying and managing these solutions often requires specialized skills. This is where managed AI services excel.  

By offering an end-to-end service, your provider can manage resource-intensive AI use cases such as virtual agents, agent assist, and insights and analytics. This includes model training, 24/7 monitoring and support. Their expertise helps you quickly implement AI solutions that deliver an immediate return on investment, while streamlining and automating data collection for future AI initiatives. 

MSPs also ensure that AI solutions are designed and deployed responsibly. This involves transparency regarding data usage, proactive assessment of potential harms and compliance with data security and privacy regulations. 

4. Simplify the transition from complex legacy systems 

Fully on-premises contact centre solutions are becoming less common due to their increasing complexity and maintenance challenges. Monitoring physical servers and even simple configuration changes require specialized skills often lacking with in-house IT teams. 

As vendors discontinue support for on-premises solutions, companies running these environments can benefit from the expertise of an MSP. MSPs can guide the transition to cloud-based solutions and provide ongoing management and maintenance. 

5. Deliver an enhanced customer experience  

Elevate your customer experience with a provider that constantly monitors all aspects of your contact centre environment, proactively resolving issues before they impact your customers. For example, if an error causes a fraction of calls to drop, you might not notice the issue for hours or even days. With 24/7 proactive monitoring, your MSP can detect the problem almost immediately and resolve it quickly. 

Your MSP can also leverage AI to deploy, monitor and fine-tune the intent-recognition processes of your virtual agents. This allows them to provide immediate and appropriate responses, minimizing customer friction and reducing virtual agent abandonment rates. 

Choosing the right managed service provider: a guide to success 

The right managed service provider can transform your contact centre, fostering stronger customer and agent relationships and delivering exceptional experiences. Here's a breakdown of key criteria to consider when making your choice: 

• Expertise across the board: Look for a provider with a deep understanding of various contact centre technologies. This ensures flexibility as your needs evolve, preventing you from being locked into a single vendor or solution. 
• Strong vendor partnerships: Close relationships with technology vendors translate into volume discounts and priority servicing for you. This translates into cost savings and faster resolutions for any issues. 
• Dedicated customer success management: Partner with providers who have dedicated resources to identify, enable and optimize your contact centre. This proactive approach ensures tangible benefits and outcomes tailored to your unique business needs. 
• End-to-end support: The more your service provider can assist with your IT operations, the greater their potential for identifying and implementing improvements. They can connect seemingly unrelated alerts impacting multiple systems, streamlining operations, management and troubleshooting across your organization. 
  
  

Elevate your contact centre with Bell's managed services 

Bell boasts over 25 years of experience managing contact centres across diverse industries, including finance, government, retail and transportation. Our expertise lies in streamlining change deployment through a DevOps model, automating delivery and testing processes. We manage some of Canada's largest contact centres – including our own – and we can bring that same level of expertise to yours. 

Through our acquisitions of FX Innovation, CloudKettle and HGC Technologies, we've assembled a team of Salesforce experts who efficiently integrate critical CRM data with ServiceNow and cloud solutions. This empowers organizations with end-to-end digital workflow automation, enhancing data quality by leveraging the power of cloud and AI. Furthermore, by drawing on the expertise of Bell and our partner ecosystem, we can manage your networks, security and more.  

Visit our website to learn more about how we can help simplify and enhance your contact centre.