Going digital in the contact center: What you should know

What does a technology leader consider digital transformation to be? According to Salesforce digital transformation is “the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements”. This reimagining of business in the digital age is digital transformation.

What stands out within the definition is customer experience (CX). Digital technology transformation should always place the customer at its forefront. Reimagining the way we do business is, first and foremost, reimagining how we interact with the customer. It affects every aspect of the business from human resources and security, to sales and marketing.

For a customer-centric business such as the contact center, digital transformation plays an especially important role. Expectations continue to rise as customers seek real-time, personalized and efficient support to solve their issues through the channel that is most convenient for them. If your contact center is not able to provide the sort of CX that is expected, it will most likely fall short of customer expectations.

Leading your business into the digital sphere is the best way to provide an omnichannel customer interaction hub, with options that range from mobile channels to chatbots. Let’s explore how digital transformation can have a positive effect on the most common channels and open the door for new options.

Telephony

Choosing a collaboration system, and the telecommunications provider behind it, is one of the most important decisions when operating a contact center. Most organizations are worried about the investment they made on existing infrastructures and relationships since they are still operating a legacy on-premises solution ongoing agreements. This concern usually plays a big part in delaying the process of migrating the contact center to the cloud.

Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)

Promptly answering incoming requests and routing them to the right agent or the team is the first step to successful customer interactions. Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) work with both Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) systems and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Much like telephony solutions, the majority of these systems still operate on a legacy on-premises basis, thus not taking advantage of digital capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automated system integrations.

Storage Options

21-century contact centers have trouble facing change and disrupting the business model as they need to meet government regulatory compliance and IT requirements on how to host platform-generated data, depending on where they are located and where this data needs to be stored and processed. From choosing between private or public storage options, down to meeting country-level data regulations, there’s a lot to consider when migrating to the cloud.

Provider

Different businesses have different needs, which in turn play a huge role when selecting the appropriate partner from a variety of software service providers. Alignment between different digital deployment solutions is critical in order to effectively connect a customer journey and create a leading customer service and support organization. When selecting their partner of choice, it is important for organizations to be aware of how flexible, scalable and seamlessly integrated their solutions are, in order not to disrupt current business models and data systems and have customer interactions running smoothly. Benefits like an easy-to-use interface for agents, that works in any location and any device, as well as automated integrations that reduce effort in manual tasks and automatically provide relevant customer data in real time, can play a huge role when choosing your next cloud provider.

Security & Compliance

In 2018, Gartner predicted that 60% of digital businesses would suffer major service failures by 2020 due to the inability of security teams to manage digital risk, while a survey by Fortinet concluded that 85% of chief information security officers view security issues related to digital transformation as having a somewhat to extremely large effect on their companies. For a change that impacts customer data so largely like digital transformation, appropriate security strategies and solutions should be placed at the forefront of the process. When moving to the cloud, as with any big change in the organization, security should be a top priority. Contact centers should be able to have quick and easy access to their main security Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as well as closely monitor and manage security incidents to protect both their customers and their business reputation.