The Future is Now: Creating an Intelligent Cloud Contact Center to Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences Today’s organizations compete on customer experience and this trend will define the shape and scope of contact centers well into the next decade. To deliver the level of seamless experiences that customers expect, contact centers will need to harness all the advantages technology can offer – specifically, the cloud – to create an “intelligent cloud contact center” that utilizes machine learning and real-time data analysis.
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The Cloud is Key to Digital Era CX If you’re already operating a cloud contact center, you may skip this section and jump to the Intelligent Cloud Contact Center below. But, if you’re still on-prem and starting to wonder and envision just what a cloud contact center could do for you, here are some things to consider. Today’s consumers are loyal not to organizations, but to the experience they have – moment by moment – with an organization. That means loyalty is always based on the present experience. Dimension Data reports that 88 percent of companies believe customer experience (CX) is a competitive differentiator.1 At the forefront of this is customer care. Brands may hit all the marks for great CX across the customer journey, but if they fail to deliver in the contact center, customers will churn. American Express reports that, “More than half of Americans have scrapped a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service, and 33 percent say they’ll consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service.”2 Customers also report that the top three factors3 that impact customer satisfaction with CX services are: 70.7% – ease of resolution 52.5% – agent knowledge 42.8% – ease of contact choice/accessibility Technology has changed customer expectations and the delivery systems that contact centers can use to provide great customer experiences. In fact, the contact center is set to undergo more change within the next five years than it has during the last 25 years. Organizations that embrace these changes will have a distinct advantage and be prepared to harness the advances that data, machine learning and artificial intelligence are gearing up to offer.
Key to all of this is the cloud While many contact centers are still on-prem, the lifespan of those systems is waning and the shift in the market is toward cloud contact centers. On-prem has provided the best it could offer; however, it lags way behind the cloud today in terms of scalability, ease of use, cost-effectiveness, hands-off maintenance, uptime, and integration with CRM, WFO and UC systems. Moving to the cloud is a business imperative decision. Not only for the benefits a cloud contact center provides, but because on-premises systems are fast becoming outdated and cost prohibitive to customize, update, and upgrade. They cannot keep pace with the capabilities the cloud contact center offers. Nor can they empower you to compete with peers who have moved to the cloud and are already generating exceptional customer and agent experiences. So, step one is to move your contact center to the cloud. ASAP. Once you are operating a cloud contact center, the next step is to start leveraging everything this enables you to do. This is where the “Intelligent Cloud Contact Center” comes into play.
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The Intelligent Cloud Contact Center An intelligent cloud contact center allows you to unlock customer insights and intelligence that reside in various systems across your organization to consistently provide extraordinary experiences your customers will love. It is made up of several components that, combined, truly set intelligent cloud contact centers apart. While every intelligent cloud contact center is different, they all embody the following characteristics:
Delivers an omnichannel experience Customers have come to expect customer service and sales departments to be able to provide a true omnichannel experience. Many contact centers already offer multi-channel support providing the ability for the customer to choose which channel they want to use to reach out to a business. However, those channels are often not tied together to represent the journey the customer has taken with a company. For example, if a customer emails support, then chats with an agent on a website, then decides to call the next day, the agent does not have knowledge of these previous interactions. By contrast, omnichannel integrates every channel and delivers a complete view of the customer journey to the agent and the business. Then, in that moment of truth when the customer talks to a live agent, every interaction is available to them. The customer does not have to repeat their story – the agent can just pick up where the customer left off.
An intelligent cloud contact center easily tracks, maps, plans, and executes based on the customer journey. Equips and empowers agents and supervisors Agent experience When agents need to work among several disparate platforms, they cannot provide the same level of customer service that agents using integrated cloud platforms can provide. That disconnect, a result of forcing agents to hunt down data on multiple systems, frustrates agents – and customers. Intelligent cloud contact centers are intuitive, easy to learn and use. They tie the agent desktop, CRM solutions and WFO into one desktop that empowers agents to deliver great customer experiences, easily manage scheduling, and identify learning and coaching needs – without having to juggle various systems. Intelligent screen pop provides more than the standard record. It provides data that is journey aware, focused on customer intent, and weaves together multiple sources of data when a customer reaches out to a live agent. Gamification also plays a key role in the intelligent cloud contact center by helping to motivate and add healthy competition for agents through the use of recognition, redeemable reward points and leaderboards. Supervisor experience Supervisors benefit from an intelligent cloud contact center’s reporting features and performance dashboards. They can monitor KPIs, make process changes based on real-time and historic analysis of agent behaviors, and have transparent agent-level metrics with moment-by-moment feedback.
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This data is delivered in easy visuals that lets supervisors make changes on the fly based on information gathered about the contact center. It ensures that supervisors have the data and capability to continually optimize the contact center and agent performance. Reporting As mentioned, intelligent cloud contact centers offer powerful, actionable reporting that easily measures everything that matters: average handle time, speed to answer, hold times, transfers, first contact resolution, etc. The ease and depth of reporting lets you quickly identify key issues and enables supervisors to implement process changes to improve customer service and efficiency.
Integrated CRM, WFO and UC systems If you’re running an on-prem solution, you know how challenging system integrations can be. With on-prem, they’re expensive, require professional services, are a hassle to install, configure and set up and are very sensitive to versions. You also end up owning the integration instead of the vendor, which means you need someone to maintain the integration for upgrades and updates. Upgrades are always a precarious decision because you never know if it will work or if it will break the technology. It’s difficult to make changes to the process flow for agents which in turn slows down or even stops the ability to improve the business. The cloud solves for all these issues. And, the best intelligent cloud contact center solutions make organizations run more effectively by incorporating tight integrations and open APIs with all the key systems your organization runs. Tightly integrated systems managed within an intelligent cloud contact center solution give you the ability to understand the business, react to business changes in an agile manner, and improve the business iteratively through accurate data and analysis. These integrations are important to enabling a truly competitive differentiation based on customer experience. These include integrations with: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tight integration with the CRM enables access to customer information on purchase and service history, customer preferences and customer value. It also delivers interaction-specific context and customer intent to agents to efficiently and effectively serve customers, increase first contact resolution and decrease average handle time. Workforce Optimization (WFO) Integrated Workforce Optimization systems increase efficiency and quality. They should include quality management to address customer experience issues, easily request training and coaching, and of course to monitor quality. It is also important to have workforce management capabilities for accurate staffing, shift changes, PTO requests, and schedule adherence. Gamification helps to keep agents engaged through recognition and rewards. Unified Communications (UC) A critical integration that boosts an agent’s ability to successfully manage the most complex cases is having UC integrated into the contact center so that subject matter experts (SMEs) can be contacted to provide answers to the toughest customer questions. This feature of intelligent cloud contact centers lets agents use your UC to easily escalate calls, track interactions with SMEs, which can increase first call resolution.
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Security, Compliance, Reliability and Scalability Intelligent cloud contact centers that are tightly integrated create a more secure, compliant, reliable and scalable system. Integration makes compliance with HIPPA, GDRP, PCI, Sarbanes Oxley, Dodd Frank, and other regulations much easier and defensible. Due to economies of scale and investment, cloud contact centers can deliver superior product availability. They can also scale easily which helps fast growing businesses, seasonal businesses, or even in weather related events. Intelligent cloud contact centers are currently setting the bar for customer experience with customers at leading brands. Wherever you are in your journey, now is the time to transform your contact center into an intelligent cloud contact center that fully leverages these features for customers and agents.
Three Steps to Transition to an Intelligent Cloud Contact Center You now see the benefits an intelligent contact center delivers. But how do you get there? At Wavenet, we believe there are three critical steps in your journey to an intelligent cloud contact center. The most significant prerequisite is to move to the cloud, as we’ve discussed.
1. Move to the cloud. The time is now. Moving to the cloud speeds digital transform in your contact center and enables an omnichannel experience immediately. You always get the latest and greatest features the cloud offers in a timely and easy manner, without having to make manual updates. The cloud is ready for enterprise contact centers with secure, scalable and reliable performance. Dimension Data reports that 71.7 percent of organizations will have some form of cloud-based solutions in the coming year, and cloud-based deployments grew by 36.1 percent last year, while on-prem systems fell in tandem.4
2. Tightly integrate the cloud contact center into your ecosystem. Moving to the cloud alone is not enough to ensure the best customer experience. Your CRM, WFO and UC systems must be tightly integrated into the cloud contact center to create that omnichannel experience – and drive ease of resolution. Integrating your systems doesn’t have to be difficult. The best cloud contact center solutions offer packaged integrations and APIs that work out-of-the-box so you can focus on digitally transforming your business. An intelligent cloud contact center does the integration and maintenance for you, allowing you to focus on your business, not maintaining your contact center hardware and software.
3. Get your data house in order; it’s the gateway to AI. Your contact center has a wealth of customer data that holds untapped value for the organization. Call recordings in particular hold insight directly into what customers wants, in their own words. An intelligent cloud contact center takes data that has been traditionally difficult to leverage on a wide scale and surfaces key insights for improved CX and operational decisions.
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Machine learning has advanced natural language processing, transcription, and speech analytics considerably – providing for a basic understanding of language. The next phase requires well-structured and well labeled data that is specific to your industry and business. Moving to the cloud enables the easy collection, structuring and labeling of data across several areas including voice recordings, CRM and WFO. Getting your data house in order via the cloud is the only way to prepare for the further advancements that artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to bring in the near future. In fact, whether or not you are prepared already matters to customers. Salesforce reports that 51 percent of consumers report AI has already impacted their expectations of companies.5 Moving to the cloud, tightly integrating systems into your contact center and getting your data in order are all key steps toward an intelligent cloud contact center.
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As highlighted, the first step to an intelligent cloud contact center is to move to the cloud. The Five9 Genius™ Intelligent Cloud Contact Center delivers everything outlined in this paper. While there are numerous cloud contact center vendors to choose from, Five9 is one of the only cloud-native companies. That means we were created in the cloud, for the cloud, and have the deepest cloud contact center expertise in the industry. Companies who partner with Wavenet experience a modern, high-touch, personalized service. We believe that the people who deliver customer experiences should have exceptional customer experiences, and Wavenet is recognized in the industry as providing that for our customers. Wavenet makes moving to the cloud a positive, transformative experience and empowers you with the guidance, partnership and continued customer support to ensure that your enterprise delivers the best possible experience to your customers and agents. We partner with your business through our Account Management and Technical Account Management teams who get to know your business and stay with you long-term to support your intelligent cloud contact center as your business evolves. Contact us today to see how we can help. 1.
Dimension Data. 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report.
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American Express, https://about.americanexpress.com/press-release/ wellactually-americans-say-customer-service-better-ever
3-4. Dimension Data. 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report. 5.
Salesforce Research. State of the Connected Customer. Second Edition.
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