Contact Center Use Cases: How to Use a Contact Center in Your Industry

When you think of contact centers, you might just think of agents answering customers’ questions about products or services. While this is one common use case 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.

What is a Contact Center?

A contact center manages inbound and outbound communications across various channels between organizations and the customers or other parties who reach out to them. Contact centers are used in virtually every industry for a wide variety of purposes.

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 different organizations use contact centers in various industries, and, more specifically, how our customers are using ice Contact Center in their organizations:

Contact Center for Education

From parents of elementary school students receiving school closure notifications to university students paying their tuition over the phone, contact centers are used in the education industry at every level.

Contact center usage in education extends beyond just students and parents, though. For example, contact centers can be used for IT help desks for professors or administrators at a school board. Integrations to student information systems may be particularly useful add-ons in education contact centers.

Read on for an example of how one of our customers is using ice for education, or check out ice Contact Center for Education.

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 can 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.

Contact Center for the Service Industry

The service industry may be the industry most commonly associated with contact centers. But even within the service industry, there are many more uses for contact centers than simply answering customers’ questions about the organization’s services. For example, organizations may use contact centers for appointment booking, providing delivery updates, or conducting surveys to improve their services.

Below, see an example of how one of our customers in the service industry is using ice Contact Center.

IVR for Food Services Ordering

A food services company increased their 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. This increases speed of service and customer satisfaction.

Contact Center for Government

Since governments at every level – municipal, state/provincial, and federal – provide such a wide range of services to people from every walk of life, it should be no surprise that the list of use cases for contact centers in government is wide and varied as well.

To learn more, check out ice Contact Center for Government, or keep reading for examples of how some of our government customers are using ice.

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.

IVR for Efficient Support Payment Updates

A child support payment inquiries hotline was using a slow and lengthy DTMF menu. The system was often overwhelmed, giving busy signals to callers. When they chose to move to ice for their IVR system, the decision led to a decrease in their operator-assisted calls by 40%.

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.

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.

Contact Center for Healthcare

In an industry as important as healthcare, reliable communications are essential. From appointment booking and physician locators to lab results inquiries and insurance coverage inquiries, there are many ways to use a contact center in the healthcare industry.

See below for examples of what our healthcare customers are doing with ice, or check out ice Contact Center for Healthcare.

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 a quick way 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.

Automated Patient Screening Calls

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 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.

Omnichannel Service for Youth Counselling

A confidential counselling service using ice Contact Center 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.

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.

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 service's 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.

Contact Center for Manufacturing and Supply Chain

Contact centers may be used in the manufacturing and supply chain industry for help desk, product support, recall notices, on-the-road check-ins from drivers, and more. See ice Contact Center for Manufacturing and Supply Chain or read on to learn how some of our customers are using ice in the manufacturing and supply chain industries.

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.

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. Once identified, calls from premium customers are assigned only 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. 

Contact Center for Media and Journalism

In the media and journalism industry, contact centers may be used for tip lines, subscription services like renewing or cancelling subscriptions, and more. See below to learn how one of our customers is using ice Contact Center in the media and journalism industry.

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.

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