Cloud Contact Centers have come a long way from the IVRs and ACD’s of the traditional premise-based solutions of years past. As it currently stands, less than 15% of the current workplace infrastructure has moved to a cloud contact center, but the reality is just like with UCaaS, that the cloud will be replacing premise-based solutions by another 50% through 2025. So, we are assuming you are in agreement that contact center solutions will be moving to the cloud, and therefore, we’ll be identifying whether the features that have traditionally been used specifically for the cloud contact center have any positive impacts on the rest of your organization. This is also considering that work from home initiatives are being forced upon most medium to large businesses. We will be challenging you to think of the contact center solution as an enterprise wide solution, that allows for better workplace and customer experience.
A big question to ask yourself is this, does your organization place value on your users providing a great customer experience as well as a great internal user experience? Does the organization understand the competitive nature of the workplace and that users having a great experience is just as important as the customer having a great experience and that they go hand in hand? If you don’t see value in this, probably not a good reason to read further unless you feel like this could be important at a later date.
Ok, so let’s dig into this. First, what are the features that your contact center personnel are using? CRM, IVR, ACD, voice recognition, call analytics, auto-dialer, omni-channel communications, agent assist, chatbots, workforce automation (WFO), etc.
Now let us think about the structure of most companies by departments, Sales, Customer Support, Marketing, HR, Finance, Operations, IT and Executives.
We know at this point that customer support, which is 100% focused on providing customers with an excellent experience, are currently using the features of your contact center software. We know that sales is using CRM and marketing is heavily focused on analytics. What about HR? Do employees often call needing records or information related to their employee account, for example employee IDs, how many days off they have available, login information, etc. Can any of this be automated using voice recognition or omni-channel communications? Does automation free up HR to do other things while providing your end users with a better experience? What if sales could tie their omni-channel communications to the CRM and could have at dashboard level all the analytics related to their customers as it related to those communications. Sales managers having the additional visibility of being able to see reports and analytics at the contact center level as it related to all real-time aspects of customer interaction between not only sales, but customer support and marketing so decisions could be made in real-time about how to address a clients needs. Could IT benefit from additional automation related to resetting internal user passwords, help-desk support, reports and analytics regarding number of calls related to certain employees. What about omni-channel communication from their users, whether it be chat, SMS, voice, email and having a way to track it all so they can provide the best level of support to those internal users. What about the idea of tying your CRM natively into your cloud contact center so everything related to your users and customers are at the appropriate departments finger tips.
If you agree that what gets measured, and is worth measuring, gets improved, then the question is can you get further visibility from having all kinds of communication analytics at your fingertips? Does this visibility assist in your decision making process as it relates to prospects, customers, vendors, internal employees, etc?
The cloud contact center’s evolution has become what we believe to be the de facto standard of how we will be communicating as businesses well into the future. The collapsing of our communications into a reportable and repeatable collaboration tool that provides infinite visibility into your prospects, customers, vendors and internal users is here and now.
The question is, does this information drive better communications with your customers and ultimately a better customer experience. Does it assist your internal departments to work more efficiently and provide a better user experience? Can the information provide valuable analytics, which are at your team’s finger tips so your organization can make informed decisions from the top to the bottom?
We believe the answer is a resounding YES, but every business is different and only you can answer the question. What we can tell you is your competitors are looking at these tools and they are working hard to make sure they can be competitive not only with providing the customer solutions that your business does best, but also making sure both internal users and external customers are having the best experience possible so they can win every time.
We would be happy to explore further the specific use cases on how CCaaS transformed not only the contact center, but how it can transform your entire organization to a well-oiled communication machine! Contact us today to discuss Contact Center as a Serivce can help you and your business.
