The contact center has always been a hub of rapid innovation. More than just an environment for handling customer queries and requests, your contact center is the heart behind your company’s growth.
The right technology and processes are how you ensure you’re not just capturing and converting customers, customers but retaining their loyalty.
As customer expectations have evolved, the contact center has transformed with them. Right now, the two biggest factors influencing the growth of this landscape are the rise of cloud technology, and the introduction of more innovative AI tools.
The question is, how do you make sure you’re getting the most value out of your cloud transition and AI adoption strategy?
Here are six critical steps to mull over for your contact center transformation.
Step 1: Choose a Cloud Migration Expert
Demand for cloud technologies in the contact center is increasing, but many companies still struggle to plan and implement a successful migration strategy. Depending on the size of your contact center, and the existing tools you already use, the transition to the cloud can be complex.
Choosing a cloud migration vendor to guide you through the process can help to reduce costs and complexity as you create your new cloud environment. For instance, Five9 offers access to migration support, custom platform integration solutions, and even product training to help ease the adoption of cloud solutions.
What’s more, thanks to their recent acquisition of Aceyus, Five9 can now help companies unify and maintain their data as they move through the migration journey. That takes us to our next tip.
Step 2: Align your Cloud Ecosystem and Data
To get the most value out of your cloud-based contact center in 2024, you need more than just a flexible CCaaS solution. You need a system that can bridge the gaps between all the tools and resources your teams use, and the data shared between them.
Choosing a CCaaS platform that integrates seamlessly with your unified communication platform will help to align your teams and boost collaboration between staff. Combining your UCaaS/CCaaS solution with integrations for workforce optimization tools, and customer relationship management platforms, will help boost team productivity and enhance resource management.
Not only will creating an aligned cloud environment help empower your teams, but it will align and unify your data, making it easier to surface important insights about employee and team performance, call quality, and customer journeys.
Step 3: Add Self-Service AI to Your Omnichannel Strategy
Embracing CCaaS as the foundation for your customer service strategy doesn’t just help your company save money and boost the productivity of your teams. It also gives you the agility you need to offer service on a range of different channels and platforms.
Based on your insights into customer journeys, you should already have an insight into which channels are most valuable to your customers, from video to SMS and social media. A truly omnichannel contact center solution will allow you to not only leverage those channels, but sync the data between them, maintaining context through conversations.
It should also allow you to implement one of the most popular forms of AI in the contact center: self-service assistants. Giving your customers access to virtual agents that they can interact with through voice or text on a range of channels can help you deliver 24/7 service and reduce the strain on your teams. The key to truly delivering great AI experiences, however, is customization.
Step 4: Customize Your Generative AI Bots
While countless CCaaS vendors today offer access to generative AI bots, capable of responding creatively to a range of questions and queries across channels, not all of these tools support customization. In the past, if you wanted to create a “branded” bot experience infused with your company’s data and unique tone of voice, you’d need to hire a professional developer.
However, some CCaaS innovators are streamlining the process of building your own Gen AI experiences. For instance, Five9’s Gen AI studio will soon allow companies to build bots that power unique, personalized interactions, with custom prompts, model fine-tuning and more.
Plus, the studio gives you comprehensive control over Generative AI outputs, so you can implement the benefits of generative AI with guardrails, addressing compliance concerns. A low-code, user-friendly hub like this could give you the power to turbo-charge your generative AI strategy.
Step 5: Augment Your Agents with AI
Notably, artificial intelligence isn’t just an incredible tool for enhancing customer experiences, it can improve employee experiences and performance too. Agent Assist tools, built into your cloud contact center can provide real-time training, coaching, and guidance to staff during conversations.
They can leverage insights from both historical and real-time data to suggest next best action steps to staff members, and even monitor sentiment in real-time. Some contact center AI tools can even help supervisors and business leaders identify coaching opportunities or improve their scheduling strategy.
There are even CCaaS platforms like Five9 that infuse AI into everything from quality management processes to workflow automation, helping to optimize agent performance.
Step 6: Use AI Insights for Ongoing Optimization
Finally, remember embracing cloud technology and artificial intelligence doesn’t end with choosing a CCaaS platform and leveraging intelligent tools. AI has the power to constantly guide you towards new ways to optimize your contact center strategy.
Using AI analytical tools within your contact center, you can track key contact center insights, to discover trends in customer service requests, predict consumer behaviors, and even find new ways of automating time-consuming processes.
Advanced AI solutions can surface the insights your team needs to make intelligent, data-driven decisions that reduce operational costs, improve productivity, and enhance the customer experience, giving you an edge over the competition.
Embracing the Cloud and AI in 2024
The scalability and flexibility of the cloud gives companies an excellent opportunity to integrate the latest tools and technologies into their contact center platform. With a flexible CCaaS solution, you can discover the cost-saving benefits of the cloud and enhance both employee and customer experiences with intelligent technology.
