While many systems within hosted PBX provider Thinking Phone’s (News - Alert) coherent customer communications, or the “C3 (News - Alert) platform,” offer exceptional opportunities and functionalities in improving a company’s customer relationship management, or “CRM,” platform, there is more to improving the efficiency of a call center than just dynamic feature capabilities.

According to Thinking Phone’s CTO Derek Yoo, call centers today are under intense pressure to maximize their efficiency and workload throughput. However, Yoo said, the existing communications and CRM systems deployed in typical call center environments are often not integrated together. 

By combining and integrating the two systems, CRM companies can improve response times, as well as overall call center performance.

And, since managers seek to have a system that compiles operations for a complete, comprehensive reporting as a way to gauge what is happening in real time and to measure call center performance, combining the two interfaces is a way companies can organize operations and manage efficiency within a company. 

The problem, however, with integrating these systems is that reporting and analytic tools in many CRM and call center environments are designed to operate on a solo basis. 

For example, phone systems, ticketing systems and order management systems are not often offered in combined views. “This limits visibility into what is happening in the call center,” Yoo said. 

However, Thinking Phone offers a solution to this existing conundrum. 

“Thinking Phone Networks C3 is an ideal platform for call center environments that includes both UC components as well as integrated customer management applications,” Steven Kokinos, CEO of Thinking Phone, said.

With various features, a company utilizing Thinking Phone’s C3 platform combines operational functionalities to create a one stop shop for users, including: 

·         C3 Voice and Communicator provide the UC core including underlying phone, presence and messaging capabilities needed to communicate with customers. 

·         C3 Call Center provides advanced communications routing, Auto-attendants, ACD, call queues, call recording and real time consoles.

·         C3 CRM and Support provide customer contact mgmt and support ticketing functions for tracking inbound support requests.

·         C3 Analytics provides advanced reporting features to track agent performance and call center statistics across all of the C3 modules.

With these combined functionalities, the UC platform allows users to have a common platform for both customer facing and internal communications.

“By using one system, a common set of routing logic can be applied to inbound requests across multiple communications channels,” Kokinos said. 

“Using a platform such as C3, inbound customer communications are automatically tracked and recorded within the support ticketing systems,” Yoo said, adding that this can reduce the need for manual data input. 

And, with agents having the ability to receive screen pops with critical information about the account when inbound customer requests are delivered with Thinking Phone’s system, the speed with which agents can respond can improve, which ultimately increases the time agents have to deal with issues reported.

“Instead of just looking at separate phone system, and ticketing reports, call center managers can see integrated statistics that include data from the phone system, instant messaging and presence data, account information and support tickets,” Yoo said.

With this system, a dashboard view combining all the data can show an agent’s performance history with respect to calls handled, time taken per call, emails handled, inbound IMs handed, amount of time spent idle or away – from presence data – and the number of tickets handed. 

“By having all this data summarized in one place, call center managers can get improved visibility into their operation,” Kokinos said.