15 Ways to Use a Contact Center in Various Industries

When you think of contact centers, you might just think of agents answering customers’ questions. While this is one common use for contact centers, that’s not all they do. From appointment booking services to help desks and everything in between, contact centers are used by all kinds of organizations across all industries.

With the availability of integrations with CRM, workforce management tools, and more, along with channels like email, IM, SMS, and social media, contact centers can be configured to meet your organization’s exact needs. Read on to see some of the ways our customers are using ice Contact Center in their organizations:

1. Outbound Dialing for School Notifications - A school board uses ice for outbound dialing to notify parents and students of school shutdowns, lockdowns, snow days and absenteeism. The school could dial multiple numbers for each parent, eliminating the need to call the numbers individually. Teachers are able to send messages to specific grades, schools or the whole region.
2. IVR for Food Services Ordering - A food services company increased efficiency by enabling customers to call in and check their invoices, order items, and get operating summaries through a bilingual speech application. On call entry, the caller simply inputs their location ID and password to access all services.
3. Biometrics for Identification and Cost Savings - ice uses voice biometrics to accurately verify the identity of a caller. This sophisticated feature is successfully used by a government to ensure that low-risk criminals under house arrest are indeed at home by calling their home phone at random times. This application offers relief to busy jails with a solution that is more effective and less costly than the administration of ankle bracelets.
4. IVR for Efficient Support Payment Updates - A child support payment inquiries hotline chose ice for their IVR system; this decision led to a decrease in their operator-assisted calls by 40%. Their previous DTMF menu was slow and lengthy. The system was often overwhelmed, giving busy signals to callers. Now, callers can dial in and speak their account number and PIN to receive payment updates. For more complex inquiries, callers can leverage the organization’s comprehensive website and access live operators.
5. Support for Children and Family Programs - ice Contact Center connects children and those involved with their care and wellbeing to provincial government resources using multimedia support lines with call recording. These lines allow social workers, foster parents, and others to receive assistance through the channels that work best for them. Areas of support include child welfare and care, fostering and adoption, youth justice, and Indigenous family programs. ice Contact Center supports the ministry’s mission to ensure all children and youth in the region live in safe, healthy, and nurturing families that allow them to be strongly connected to their communities and culture.
6. COVID-19 Vaccination Appointment Booking - As the COVID-19 pandemic persised, government institutions across the globe were creating plans to vaccinate the public. A government institution needed to quickly implement a contact center to facilitate vaccination appointments across the region. Their needs consisted of a quick deployment and to ensure the solution could handle a high volume of callers without rejecting any from the system (giving callers a busy signal). After a quick consultation, their ice Contact Center application was built and deployed in the cloud in just under 4 business days. The solution included a simple call flow with a callback option to ensure every caller could reach the contact center.
   Prior to the Contact Center going live, business leaders with no prior developer knowledge were able to take advantage of the user-friendly iceAdministrator tool to modify their workflows to suit their needs. Within the first two days, the institution increased the number of phone lines to accommodate a high volume of callers. As a result, the contact center continued to run smoothly and facilitate vaccine appointments across the region.
7. Automated Notifications for COVID-19 Test Results - A centralized provincial health system had been using ComputerTalk’s automated notification tool, iceAlert, with great success for years, for purposes such as appointment reminders and public health campaigns. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the provincial health system and the rest of the healthcare industry faced new challenges. From these challenges arose new use cases for iceAlert. With the advent of widespread COVID-19 testing across the province, hundreds of thousands of patients needed ways to receive their test results. The organization decided to use iceAlert to deliver notifications of test results to patients by SMS. The provincial health system quickly scaled up their usage, taking full advantage of iceAlert’s scalability and ease of use to quadruple monthly output with no downtime. iceAlert was used to deliver test results to every person in the province who got a COVID-19 test and opted to receive results by SMS.
8. Automated Patient Screening Calls - During the COVID-19 pandemic, optimizing healthcare resources became especially important. Fortunately, iceAlert was used to help hospitals prevent the spread of COVID-19 while saving resources and focusing efforts on patient care. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many non-essential health appointments were cancelled or postponed to limit the spread of the virus in hospitals. However, some appointments, such as treatments for cancer patients, were a necessity and needed to continue. For those appointments, other precautions were implemented. One regional hospital group’s safety measures involved nurses calling cancer patients prior to their appointments to ask them a series of 10 screening questions. The purpose was to identify those at higher risk of carrying the virus. While important for the health and safety of patients and staff, these screening calls were time-consuming and costly. To save time and money without compromising on care, the organization decided to automate the process using iceAlert. iceAlert allowed hospitals to automatically collect the questionnaire results by phone without needing hospital staff to manually make the calls. Staff could simply view reports on the results to check for red flags, ultimately making more resources available for patient care.
9. Mobile Application for Car Insurance Claims - An insurance company leverages a number of features made available through iceMobile Connect, ComputerTalk's mobile contact center integration. They can learn the exact location of accidents, view photos of collisions, and move conversations across media channels, using the power of the mobile device. The insurer saves money and time as information is filed electronically and instantly. The company doesn’t have to send a representative to audit the accident or the files. Furthermore, the company creates a happy, mobile-first customer that will be more likely to interact with them in the future.
10. Skills-Based Routing for Improved Speed of Service - A pipeline manufacturer uses ice to improve the quality of customer service that is delivered at their help desk. ice improved response times from 30 minutes to 18 seconds within 72 hours of going live by providing robust, skills-based call routing and auto-attendant functionality. Due to this dramatic improvement, this company is implementing ice in their external customer service and sales department contact centers.
11. Speech Recognition for Subscription Services - A nationally distributed newspaper was able to improve their customer satisfaction through a self-service speech recognition application built on ice. Subscribers can renew subscriptions, check account payments, and change their address. Non-subscribers are able to purchase subscriptions or obtain more information about the newspaper. Speech recognition allows callers to speak their needs instead of pushing keys on a keypad. The newspaper is now able to offer 24/7 self-service options without the need for additional agents.
12. Omnichannel Service for Youth Counselling - A confidential counselling service directs calls and IMs from youth in need to their choice of male, female or either agent 24/7, creating better care and accessibility. They are also able to direct university and college students with alcohol and drug dependencies who need treatment or counselling to a booking center.
13. Remote Telethon for Hospital Fundraising - During the COVID-19 pandemic, a children’s hospital foundation’s annual telethon faced an unprecedented challenge to handle calls remotely. After operating their telethon in-person for over 30 years, the foundation worked with ComputerTalk to recreate their telethon setup with ice Contact Center. The modified setup allowed staff and volunteers to handle calls from the safety and comfort of their homes. The foundation received up to 600 simultaneous calls and staff and volunteers were continuously handling a large volume of calls for 4 hours. The foundation’s staff were able to connect directly to donors and hear first-hand their stories of why they support the foundation. The staff have said that this experience was very special for them, and they are happy that ice Contact Center made it possible.
14. Advanced Routing for VIP Service - A leading multinational corporation that produces over 60,000 different products uses ice to streamline customer service for their premium accounts without negatively impacting their other customers. Regular customers are routed based on the nature of their requests. ice facilitates this company’s personalized premium customer experience by recognizing callers by phone number and/or company name, and only assigning calls from premium customers to specific agents with the appropriate skill level to handle those types of requests. This ensures that all customers receive the level of support they need.
15. Internal Help Desk for Schedule Changes - Emergency Services Personnel Managers have large fleets of specialized personnel working various shifts. Taking into consideration employment laws for hours worked, complicated vacation scheduling, and individual employee requests, this can be overwhelming and a nightmare for administrators. ice Contact Center powers an emergency paramedic services' internal help desk, allowing front-line paramedic workers who serve the region to make changes to their schedules. Enabling the organization to easily manage, track, and record each staff inquiry, ice centralizes employee requests and equips their staff to serve their region. Employees can call the organization's contact center to make changes to their schedules, book vacations, and report sick days.

 To learn more about how ice Contact Center can help your organization, request a demo today!