CX Pillar One: The Digital Shift in the Cloud Contact Center

The cloud contact center holds immense potential. If you’re not already in the cloud, then you’re missing out on serious value. 36% of contact centers are already cloud-based, and that number is growing fast. A cloud-based solution is constantly updated by your chosen, adding new functionality, without downtime.

Increasingly, customers expect to contact your business via social media. The modern customer is a 'digital native', and will reach out to your business across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and more. Bringing these into the agent interface is the first step toward a channel-agnostic contact center.

The Digital Shift means new channels, but also new technologies. Whether that’s enabling video calls or integrating with ‘metaverse’ Virtual Reality spaces; however customer expectations evolve, you’ll be ready to meet them. The cloud contact center integrates new digital channels effortlessly, creating truly omnichannel CX.

And that’s not all; a CCaaS solution brings every additional function and channel of contact into a single interface. No matter how far your contact center expands, user accessibility remains a priority.

All this and more can be achieved through the first pillar of CX, the Digital Shift. Bringing data from all digital channels into a single interface allows you to track contact center KPIs, such as:

• Average Handle Time

• First Response Time

• Customer Effort Score

• Occupancy

The Digital Shift allows you to meet customer expectations seamlessly, regardless of contact channel, transforming your contact center into a true ‘CX center’. It enables a degree of flexibility and digital connectivity that prepares your cloud contact center for the future. It brings every channel of communication into a single interface, for a seamless user experience.

CX Pillar Two: The Customer Data Platform Creates Personalized Experiences

Outstanding CX depends on personalized experiences. Your customers want to feel heard and understood, and are willing to pay extra for it. Companies that actively personalize customer contacts increase their revenue by upwards of 15%. Your agents want to tools to deliver efficient interactions. To meet both of these demands and improve both Customer Experience and Agent Experience, you need a Customer Data Platform.

The second pillar of Customer Experience is the Customer Data Platform. The Customer Data Platform efficiently aggregates an organization’s data, converging cost-effective CRM, customer journey mapping and effective knowledge management in a single environment. Customer data can then be presented within the agent interface during interactions. This brings a number of benefits to your cloud contact center:

• Customer data screen-pops empower agents to deliver efficient, personalized interactions every time the customer gets in contact.

• Track every customer interaction from across every channel, for complete customer journey mapping.

• Full interaction history presented to agents, for a truly channel and technology-agnostic contact center.

• Seamless integrations with any third-party system of record, unifying your entire IT estate within the cloud.

• Supply agents with the knowledge they need, when they need it, with knowledge democratization for your contact center.

The Customer Data Platform brings essential customer information and interaction history into the agent interface, letting them deliver outstanding experiences without needing to switch apps. This can be used to power outbound campaigns, identifying opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling, accounting for customer preferences, and pulling those numbers into the agent interface.

CX Pillar Three: Intelligent Automation Elevates the Cloud Contact Center

The next pillar of Customer Experience is Intelligent Automation. With the cloud, your horizons expand. The cloud contact center makes it easy to integrate Conversational and Generative AI into your CX ecosystem. With the recent explosion of hype surrounding AI, your customers will expect to see AI used to boost the efficiency of interactions, and free agents to focus on only the most complex inquiries.

The possibilities of AI in the cloud contact center are truly vast. They include:

• AI-powered routing that directs customers to the best available outcome based on unstructured speech.

• Intelligent pathways allow you to use automation to streamline and scale a complex communications estate.

• Conversational chatbots that can greet customers in a personalized way, helping them through self-service where necessary.

• AI agent assistants can provide script suggestions, ensuring that compliance statements are read during voice contact, and driving agents toward positive outcomes on the principle of ‘next best action’.

• AI-powered analytics that draw sentiment, tone, and intention from unstructured speech. These conversations can be summarized, letting agents and supervisors understand an interaction at a glance.

• Technology-Agnostic Intelligent Automation integrates new AI technologies into the contact center as they become available, letting you evolve as the AI landscape does.

Intelligent Automation is a CX pillar that will alter the cloud contact center in fundamental ways. The contact center can be made far more efficient, and agent experiences can be improved through AI support. If you aren’t moving to implement AI now, you’ll fall behind the competition.

CX Pillar Four: Bring Digital Customers into the Cloud Contact Center

The final pillar of Customer Experience is the ‘Digital Customer’. As more and more devices become digitally-enabled, the ‘Internet of Things’ is becoming increasingly relevant to the cloud contact center. Internet-enabled devices are ‘digital customers’ that interface with your contact center automatically, without the need for human interaction. These Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications are becoming increasingly important to the modern contact center.

Harnessing the data generated by digital customers can elevate the cloud contact center in a number of ways:

• Smart medical devices can bring real-time patient data into a ‘virtual ward’, empowering caregivers to deliver reliable, high-quality care to patients.

• Smart meters allow utilities providers to automatically check availability status across their entire network, and to access up-to-date usage data.

• Other smart devices can order products, renew services, or request technical support when a fault occurs, without the customer needing to take action.

• Blend with intelligent automation to automate transactions initiated by digital customers.

• Leverage the digitalization of the agent workspace to draw data from a host of new devices.

Accommodating digital customers by embracing the Internet of Things will prepare your cloud contact center for the future. As the number of real-world applications continues to grow, supporting digital customers will become a central pillar of Customer Experience.