Excellent customer experience is essential to success in any business environment. 58% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, while countless consumers will abandon a brand after just one poor interaction.
Unfortunately, delivering an exceptional experience requires companies to constantly invest in transformative tools and solutions to help them adhere to changing expectations. A comprehensive contact center transformation strategy is often necessary to ensure businesses can access the agile tools, resources, and technology they need to serve clients and empower employees.
While transforming the contact center can lead to a host of benefits, from improved productivity to higher satisfaction scores and customer retention rates, the process comes with a host of challenges. Around 70% of companies fail to reach their transformation goals.
Fortunately, there is a solution: Experience Assurance.
Reasons for Contact Center Transformation Failure
A comprehensive evolution or modernization of the contact center comes with a host of risks and challenges to overcome. Not only do businesses need to acquire buy-in from stakeholders and employees to implement changes, but they also need to ensure they’re leveraging the right strategies to adhere to customer goals and needs.
On top of that, transformation failures can stem from a variety of different issues, such as:
1. The Complex Journey to the Cloud
For many companies, the first step in contact center transformation is migrating legacy tools and technologies into the agile and scalable cloud landscape. The CCaaS market is currently growing to a forecast value of $23.94 billion by 2032, as companies embrace new technologies.
However, migrating a complete contact center, with numerous channels, tools, and integrations to the cloud can be time-consuming and complex. Companies can face issues with disconnects between tools and services, causing security, compliance, and productivity issues. Plus, consolidating global solutions can be difficult, particularly when working with numerous vendors.
2. Lack of Expertise
Although cloud-based contact center systems are often designed for ease of use, implementing, and configuring these solutions requires a certain level of expertise. Companies often make the mistake of assuming they can just install a platform and start evolving instantly.
However, success depends on a brand’s ability to access experts with a design thinking-based approach, a deep knowledge of CX best practices, multilingual expertise, and a commitment to comprehensive CX-led testing.
3. Improper Planning
Poor planning is the downfall of countless digital transformation projects. As companies face more pressure to digitally transform at a rapid pace, failure to think ahead can lead to significant problems. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses implementing CX transformations need to introduce new tools and processes according to a strict timeline.
However, without a plan for effective research, assessment and implementation, many organizations fail to adhere to their deadlines. This means customer experiences continue to dwindle, and the brand’s reputation suffers. What’s more, poor planning often means companies fail to fully assess which tools and services they real need. This could mean that when solutions are eventually implemented, they’re not effective at driving the business towards its goals.
4. DevOps Issue
Limited process automation makes it difficult for companies to adopt DevOps strategies and agile methodologies. DevOps is often the key to IT infrastructure agility and rapid growth. Without it, companies will struggle with adoption and consistent transformation.
DevOps is often essential for fostering a high degree of collaboration throughout the IT value chain. However, many companies still operate with a plan-build-run model, organized by siloed components, such as storage, network, and computing. This leads to bottlenecks when implementing new technologies and innovations.
5. Project Oversights
With a vague migration strategy and roadmap, companies often attempt to rapidly adapt to continuously evolving expectations, without any clear plan. This can lead to dis-alignment among employees and stakeholders, and problematic management processes.
It can also produce a variety of issues with ensuring the continued security, compliance, and performance of new contact center systems.
What role does Experience Assurance play in Contact Center Transformation?
Contact center transformation can be far more complex and confusing than many businesses realize, but it’s also essential to ensuring an evolutionary and future proof CX strategy. Investing in customer experience means investing in the future success and continued growth of your organization.
A study conducted by McKinsey even found that businesses with higher CX ratings achieve more than double the revenue of those falling behind. This demonstrates clear evidence that the contact center is no longer a “cost center”, but a core pillar of profitability.
Haphazard approaches to optimizing contact center experiences with new technologies and initiatives lead to not just financial losses, but declines in customer satisfaction, employee productivity, business performance, and growth. Fortunately, there’s an alternative approach.
Prioritizing CX Assurance in a comprehensive CX strategy allows companies to invest in cutting-edge technologies, while also implementing monitoring systems, analytical tools, testing solutions, and scaling strategies that guarantee continued success.
The Benefits of Experience Assurance
With an Experience Assurance strategy, companies can combine their plan for contact center transformation, with tools and resources designed to help them overcome common challenges. This means brands can focus on implementing solutions that actively drive them towards their CX goals, without risking inconsistencies, project delays, and wasted budget.
Experience Assurance strategies take a four-pronged approach to facilitate experience-led growth:
- CX strategy: Examining and understanding industry best practices for CX, creating roadmaps based on company objectives, tracking critical CX goals, and implementing methods for continuous improvement and optimization.
- Testing maturity: Identifying the quality of CX projects, evaluating CX testing practices, identifying risks in product developments, and searching for testing gaps.
- Pilot: Prioritizing the areas of your contact center transformation initiative that will generate the best results, and creating CX models to bridge the gaps. Leveraging automation to test all bases, and visualizing results to ensure ongoing ROI.
- Scale: Defining roadmaps for continued growth, choosing the platform best-suited to your evolving needs, and defining testing strategies for CX DevOps. Scaling also includes creating tailored adoption plans, monitoring ROI, and collaborating for continued improvement.
Following this four-pronged approach, companies can then adapt their existing DevOps approach with specialized technology, built for CX Assurance. For instance, HCLTech offers a variety of Experience Assurance framework with offerings to help businesses overcome common transformation failures.
Companies can use the “CX Safari” solution to benchmark CX and testing maturity based on industry best practices, access recommendations on required actions, and assess testing frameworks. The CX Audit solution gives businesses a deeper insight into the pain areas in their CX assurance, with technology stack gap analysis, evaluations of CX performance, and insights into corrective measure
HCLTech also offers services like “Accelerate CX” to help companies resolve the identified pain area with the right testing tool, best practice, and Managed Assurance for the deployment of fit-for-purpose QA tools. Overcoming Transformation Failures with Experience Assurance
The path to effective contact center transformation requires more than just the implementation of new technologies. Businesses need to take a comprehensive approach to ensure they can reach their experience goals, preserve performance, and minimize risk.
With Experience Assurance, companies can ensure they have the right foundations in place to support a successful, ongoing CX strategy.
To learn more, please feel free to connect with the HCLTech team at [email protected].
