What Approach to Use to Solve Complexity in Contact Centers?

Call centers have been investing in omnichannel technologies for more than a decade. The shift to the cloud has also taken place in recent years and has accelerated significantly in early 2020.

According to research, 90% of contact centers indicated they were investing in new channels, automation, and analytics tools, while 68% of migrations to the cloud occurred in 2020.

Cloud Contact Centers Lead the Way

Just one year later, cloud contact centers are reaping the rewards of having implemented cloud technology. Thus, fully cloud-based contact centers are almost twice as likely to have adopted social channels, chatbots, and business intelligence platforms.

Cloud solutions enable smarter and more strategic business decisions, and the use of analytics is also improving. In this sense, analytics can help call centers discover the aspects that influence agent and customer satisfaction, while also helping to support more effective team scheduling.

On the other hand, contact centers that are not yet in the cloud are lagging behind: two out of three are limited by their current solutions.

Less Is More

Call center leaders tend to use technology to overcome service problems and enable forward-thinking customer experience (CX) strategies. Technology is used to connect data silos and close knowledge gaps to deliver faster, more personalized and predictive service experiences. However, since its rapid deployment can be the root cause of many problems, does adding even more systems create more complexity?

3 Ways to Solve Complexity

The key to success lies in looking for technologies that solve, rather than increase, complexity. Therefore, the solutions must be:

1) Easy: Modern call center technology platforms are specifically designed to be easy to implement, learn and use. They must be solutions that offer integrations with all the existing core systems and technologies.

The best vendors provide support and guidance throughout the implementation phase and beyond. This includes essential staff training, either in person or online, to adapt to today’s increasingly hybrid workplace. Meanwhile, the technology itself must be intuitive to use. It must have the tools and functionality that make it easy for all users, including agents, managers and business leaders, to quickly see the information they need to take the appropriate action at all times.

2) Custom: Modern technology is built from scratch taking into account the needs and customer journey (customer journey). This includes features such as highly automated and AI-enhanced capabilities and workflows that are designed to drive operational efficiency while improving and accelerating CX.

3) Smart: Modern contact center technology needs to have built-in analytical capabilities, with tools that deliver customer-centric data insights, facilitating decision-making and enabling agents to add the essential human element to digital interactions that customers crave.

Leading technology platforms are designed to be omnichannel from both a customer and internal business perspective. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in solutions that are capable of extracting any data flow from anywhere within the organization, such as business intelligence (BI).

In conclusion, the smartest solutions bring together valuable BI and customer data into visual and intuitive reporting tools. This makes the data more meaningful to all users, regardless of their role or contribution to the overall business.