Beginning Your Digital Contact Center Transformation

We live in a world of cloud technology. With 93% of enterprises already using some form of cloud service, it’s highly likely that you’re already using one, or more, cloud applications.

Traditionally contact centers were on-premise, meaning that they were tied to on-site servers operated by a given organization. This limited scalability, flexibility, and were costly to maintain. Cloud services leave all that behind, offering a contact center solution hosted in a network of secure, dedicated data centers. The contact center digital shift begins with cloud migration. This has a number of benefits:

• Data centers are maintained by a dedicated team of experts, reducing the cost of internal tech support for businesses.

• Cloud services can be accessed from anywhere in the world, giving users the flexibility to work from wherever.

• Data centers provide excess capacity, letting services scale instantly as demand rises and falls.

By migrating to the cloud, you unlock the power of your digital contact center transformation. The cloud provides the requisite level of flexibility and service availability required to support next-generation CX. But what does next-generation CX look like?

The Contact Center Digital Channel Shift

Channels of customer contact are constantly rising and falling in popularity. Keeping up with these channels—meeting your customers on their terms—has a meaningful impact on the quality of your CX. 65% of customers report that they would prefer to receive more tailored communications through their preferred channels of contact.

Digital contact center transformation must begin by expanding your roster of possible communications channels:

• Social media such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

• Video calls, allowing for efficient clarification of issues and more empathetic interactions.

• Email, mobile apps, SMS and more.

What makes the digital transformation of the contact center truly special is the ability to bring all these channels into a single, intuitive interface. When the customer gets in contact, agents are presented with a full interaction history, spanning every communication channel. This allows for seamless, channel-agnostic interactions, reducing effort for both customer and agent.  Agents can switch between channels instantly, within the same interface. This allows agents to answer a diverse range of inquiries quickly.

No matter how complex your CX estate becomes, or how many channels of contact it covers, digital contact center transformation unifies all those channels in one, browser-based location. Your contact center is one step closer to becoming a true omni-channel ‘CX center’.

Flexible Reporting Through Digital Contact Center Transformation

The goal of digital contact center transformation is the creation of a cloud-based, channel-agnostic contact center. Being available to your customers isn’t the end of the journey, however. You need to create outstanding, next-generation customer experiences over every channel. And success requires knowledge.

In the next-generation contact center, essential data can be brought into a single, flexible reporting interface. This data is accurate to-the-second, and can be marshalled into historical reports for export.

Digital contact center transformation provides an exceptional level of insight into your CX. Possible metrics that can be measured include:

• Customer Satisfaction, or CSAT.

• Occupancy, or the amount of time your agents spend on calls.

• First Contact Resolution, First Response Time, and other key contact center KPIs.

• Customer Effort Score, Value Enhancement Score, and other metrics for customer success.

• All these metrics should be presented within a ‘Customer Journey Tab’, presenting a 360-degree view of all customer interactions, regardless of channel.

Metrics like these are key to identifying customer pain points and designing your customer journeys accordingly. This data can be used to anticipate demand, measuring which channels of communication your customers prefer and when, and allowing you to allocate resources accordingly.

The Next-Generation Contact Center Transformation

The contact center digital shift makes your contact center evergreen. This means that new channels can be added to your communications estate effortlessly, integrating via API, as soon as they become available.

The digital contact center is constantly evolving as different channels of communication rise and fall in popularity. Increasingly, customers expect the ability to make video calls to your organization. This allows them to better articulate their problem, with the support of a video link; when seeking technical support, or a medical diagnosis, this visual aid is invaluable.

Many brands are also adopting Virtual Reality (VR) as a possible channel for customer contact. Over two-thirds of CX industry professionals anticipate that VR and ‘immersive CX’ will become increasingly mainstream in the coming years. Brands are looking to interact with their customers within three-dimensional ‘Metaverse’ spaces, creating a truly immersive, interactive experience.