The 12 ice Tips of Christmas

If you’re familiar with the song, The 12 Days of Christmas, you know that the singer’s true love gives them some pretty useless gifts. Sure, five gold rings may be nice, but every other gift seems loud, inconvenient to take care of, and/or impossible to find the space for. And really, how many birds does one person need?

Here at ComputerTalk, we want to give our accounts something that’s actually useful. So, for these 12 days of Christmas, we’re going to share 12 tips and tricks for how to make the most of your ice Contact Center, during the holiday season and beyond:

1. ice can integrate with your homegrown CRM – From faster customer service to increased personalization, there are many reasons to integrate your CRM system with your contact center. ComputerTalk can integrate with nearly any CRM! If we don’t already have a pre-built connector for the tool you want to integrate with, we can work closely with you to build one. You can learn more about custom integrations by clicking here.
2. Create notifications to alert supervisors when warning thresholds are being met – iceMonitor lets you monitor contact center activities in real-time in a color-coded visual format. You can even customize the display to show only the statistics that are most important to your organization. This allows you to identify and address issues as they arise. However, contact center managers have much more to do than constantly monitor a dashboard. Fortunately, ice allows you to set up automated notifications so that you can be alerted when specified thresholds are being met. These notifications can come to you via email or through a Teams channel, so you can stay informed on the communication channel of your choice. To learn more about iceMonitor, check out this video (how to create alerts begins at 18:00). For more information on iceMonitor 11, check out this video.
3. Schedule reports to run automatically – Performance reports are essential not only for staying informed of what’s been happening in your contact center in the recent past, but also for guiding strategic decision-making for the future. ice Contact Center lets you schedule reports to be delivered to you via email or through a Teams channel. Take advantage of this feature to make sure you never miss an issue and are always ready to make an informed decision about the future. To learn more about iceReporting, check out this video (how to schedule reports begins at 07:45).
4. Customize layouts to meet your specific needs – Not every organization prioritizes the same statistics. Nor does every individual have the same visual preferences. Fortunately, ice Contact Center allows you to customize and rearrange layouts for both iceBar and iceMonitor. This ensures that each user can have the best layout for managing their day-to-day tasks in the most efficient manner. To learn how to change your iceMonitor layout, check out this video (layout changes begin at 06:55). To change your iceBar layout, right click on the toolbar and select Options, then Buttons. This allows you to select and deselect buttons to include on your toolbar. You can view more details on possible customizations in the iceBar Options section of your iceBar for Desktop User Manual.
5. Leverage Power BI for enhanced reporting – iceReporting provides you with many report templates and allows you to customize them to meet your specific needs (see this video beginning around 6:00). You can take your reporting to the next level by integrating with Power BI. This integration leverages a SQL replication of your contact center raw data into Power BI, enabling supervisors to create custom reports and unify analytics from other applications. This enables a holistic analysis of your business needs. Talk to your account rep for more information on how you can integrate Power BI.
6. Apply priority settings to your most important queues – Depending on the nature of your business, you may have some calls that need to be answered sooner than your average call. This may apply in cases of emergency situations, high valued clients, or time-sensitive issues. You can ensure that these types of calls are answered as soon as possible by applying priority settings to the queues that concern them. If you’ve received workflow training, you can adjust priority level and the weight that is given to a queue’s priority in iceAdministrator. This ensures that your contact center is meeting the needs of your customers and your organization. To learn more about how priority settings work, check out this video (information on queue priority begins around 07:45).
7. Take advantage of ice’s built-in evaluation tools – You can help your agents to perform at their best by providing feedback using evaluation tools. ice Contact Center has built-in evaluation tools that allow you to assess agents directly within the manager suite. Learn more about how to use these evaluation tools by watching this video.
8. Use LOB codes to classify interactions – Another tool that you can take advantage of within ice Contact Center is Line of Business (LOB) codes. These codes allow you to classify interactions so you can see important information about them at a glance. For example, you can see whether the interaction was a complaint, question, or other.
9. Use skill settings to keep both agents and customers happy – Not all agents are well-equipped to handle all calls. They may lack expertise in certain topics, or they may not be able to provide service in every language that your contact center offers. You can ensure agents only receive interactions they’re qualified to handle by setting their skill levels in different areas as applicable. This keeps customers satisfied with better quality service and prevents less experienced agents from getting overwhelmed. For more information on how to use skill settings in your contact center, check out this video (explanation of skills begins at 13:10).
10. Use canned responses for chat – Chatting with customers can get repetitive at times. From typing up a greeting for every new interaction to answering common questions over and over again, agents spend a lot of time repeating the same information. Canned responses save them time by letting them create a list of predetermined messages that can be sent to a customer in just a couple of clicks. Canned responses may be global, for the whole contact center, or user-defined, for an agent’s personal list of response options. You can configure canned responses in chat by going to your iceBar Options and selecting Canned Responses under IM Options. You may never type “Hi, thanks for reaching out! How can I help you today?” again. Find more information in the iceBar Options > IM Options section of the iceBar User Manual.
11. Enable multi-contact handling to increase service efficiency – If you’ve ever sent an IM to a customer and had to wait around for their response, you may have wished you could start another IM conversation while waiting. With ice Contact Center, you can! Multi-contact handling lets agents handle multiple IM or email contacts at once (while on a voice call or not), allowing them to serve more customers in the same amount of time. To learn more about multi-contact handling, check out this blog.
12. Take advantage of all the ice Contact Center resources available – The ComputerTalk team offers plenty of informational resources to help you make the most of your ice Contact Center all year round. For more how-to videos, check out our library of past Lunch & Learns. For shorter videos, see our YouTube channel. For company and industry news, tips and tricks, integration information, and more, check out our blog. To have news and blogs delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter. If you’re not already, follow us on Linkedin. There is no shortage of resources available and ComputerTalk is always here to provide support.

 We hope you have a very merry holiday season and a wonderful new year!