The contact centre is one of the most rapidly evolving aspects of the communication landscape today. In an era where experience is the key to success, the contact centre has been forced to adapt to an ever-more demanding marketplace of customers from multiple generations and environments.
The only way to keep up with this ever-evolving space is to move into an environment where flexibility and scalability are everywhere. Contact Centre as a Service “CCaaS” solutions give businesses of all sizes the opportunity to tap into the tools that they need to transform customer satisfaction in seconds.
Eliminating the issue of IT investments and complex hardware, CCaaS delivers pre-packaged functionality in an agile environment that’s perfect for consistent growth. The result of this infinite flexibility is that Gartner predicts 50% of contact centres deployed from this year forward will be available within the cloud.
Let’s take a closer look at CCaaS and the trends that are helping it to evolve.
Migrating to CCaaS and Choosing a Vendor
Businesses from all backgrounds are rapidly recognising the value of having a scalable and efficient contact centre in the cloud. However, unless you’re a small business that’s just getting started, making the transition from an on-premise environment into a cloud space can be complex. Companies with a lot of existing investments in the on-premise world make it difficult to switch over at a rapid pace.
To ensure that organisations have the freedom that they need to move at a pace that suits them, vendors are offering a wide selection of migration opportunities. There are now public and private cloud solutions, as well as programmable contact centres that are available through APIs and SDKs. Organisations may even use hybrid investments to maintain some of their contact centre on-premise for compliance reasons and move some of it to the cloud.
The CPaaS world even means that some vendors can provide businesses with the tools to connect all of their communication stacks in one place. With a CPaaS solution from the right vendor, companies can build contact centre functionality into their existing UCaaS solutions, making it easy to manage conversations on the backend and frontend of the business in a single pane of glass.
As the flexibility of the contact centre grows, there are even options that allow companies to integrate multiple tools from different vendors and providers. This means that business leaders can get the best results for all of their needs without being locked into a single vendor. As the environment increasingly moves away from the one-size-fits-all approach, integration and interoperability are often common concerns for buyers.
As with most contact centre investments, a strategy in the future of CCaaS starts with choosing the right vendor. Today’s businesses need to think not only about what kind of phased migration their vendors can offer but also:
- How flexible and scalable that contact centre is
- How much the company is invested in interoperability
- What kind of security and privacy components are in place
Entering the Age of the Programmable
As the contact centre evolves, we’re seeing the rise of various new and exciting trends, from global voice offered by programmable numbers that are available all around the world, to artificial intelligence and customer journey mapping.
For many business leaders, however, the true benefit of CCaaS is how easy it can be to build the perfect communication stack, one segment at a time. Contact centre technology from the programmable CX landscape rejects the one-size-fits-all concepts of days gone by, helping organisations to deliver amazing opportunities based on the unique needs of their companies, teams, and clients.
With the programmable environment, you can tap into a CPaaS contact centre delivered through the cloud, building in all the features that you need most. Every aspect of these contact centres are available to customise, including desktop UI tools, call routing strategies, and even your numbers. You can maintain a local presence with programmable numbers across the world.
Combined with in-depth artificial intelligence and user analytics, it’s easier for business leaders to build an entire contact centre solution that’s tailored to suit their customer journey. Companies can examine each touchpoint that they have with their customer and create more flexible and accessible strategies for success every step of the way.
There’s even the option in the programmable and customizable contact centre to implement features that could help with keeping team members competitive and engaged. For instance, digital wallboards and leaderboards could allow for gamification in the contact centre, making it easier for team members to track their performance and aim for the best possible outcomes.
The Future of the Contact Centre
The modern contact centre is more customisable and intelligent than ever before. We’re seeing the growing demand for contact centres that aren’t only flexible but intelligent enough to deliver truly amazing customer experiences too.
With artificial intelligence, for instance, business leaders can discover useful information about their customers, and use that data to make critical decisions about how to serve clients. AI also has the potential to assess caller needs and route them to the right agent straight away. There are even virtual assistants that can replace the IVR, delivering quick solutions to common problems for customers that need self-service opportunities, then passing the conversation to a human agent when necessary.
When conversations are delivered to agents, they can be combined with plenty of useful information about what the customer has already done, what he or she has purchased in the past, and the people that they may have interacted with before. This ensures that businesses can give their clients the kind of consistent experience they crave on every channel.
The Next Era of Customer Contact
The age of the exhausting and frustrating call-only contact centre is over. In today’s flexible and ever-transforming world, the cloud, programmable tools, and CCaaS are the keys to unlocking true success in customer conversations.
As we step further into the future, who knows what this new age of customer experience will bring. From more intelligent bots to help with handling calls, to deeper sentiment analysis and predictive tools for serving customers before a problem ever arises, the opportunities are endless.
