Delivering exceptional customer experiences is essential for any business in today’s world. Fail to live up to the evolving expectations of your target audience, and companies risk losing revenue, opportunities, and loyal brand advocates.
Unfortunately, crafting the perfect customer journey can be complex, often requiring companies to leverage a variety of tools, from WFM and analytics systems, to intelligent routing tools, security platforms, and CRM software. Many businesses work with different vendors to access each of the resources they need, creating a somewhat disjointed technology stack. 96% of contact center agents are utilizing multiple systems to engage, support, and convert customers each day.
However, large contact center vendors are beginning to explore an alternative solution, branching into multiple areas of the CX landscape at once, to create comprehensive platforms and unified tools. In the face of such competition, specialist vendors need to demonstrate their value in terms of innovative technology and expert support to stay afloat.
After all, the idea of working with fewer vendors, reducing technology complexity, and contacting a single number for support is alluring. “Converge and consolidate” may soon become the mantra of every contact center leader.
The Value of Converged and Consolidated Contact Centers
Disconnected systems and tools are common in the contact center. For years, business leaders have utilized mix-and-match collections of best-in-breed tools to handle multiple parts of the customer journey and CX strategy. However, working with numerous vendors to build an effective plan for customer support comes with a host of challenges.
Often, using disconnected systems leads to increased complexity, higher costs for labor and subscriptions, and more risks caused by siloed data. Working with a vendor that supports and empowers contact center consolidation can save companies significant time and money.
“Historically, the lack of investment into and innovation from contact center technology providers – and especially on-premises solutions – meant best-of-breed and point solutions were required to adopt new channels or digital capabilities for customer service,” stated Baker Johnson, CMO at UJET. He continued, “But as newer and more modern platforms arise that are AI, digital, and mobile first, brands are able to future proof their customer operations with fewer tools, that are more flexible, extensible, and cohesive. And as hyperscalers like Google invest in the market, this extends beyond just core channels and reporting to AI, workforce engagement, cloud infrastructure-as-a-service, and even agent workspaces.”
Innovative contact center platform vendors, UJET, for instance, provide companies with a comprehensive portfolio of complementary tools, which they can align and synchronize to suit their CX needs. More than just a platform for omnichannel customer service, UJET offers a portfolio that covers everything from outbound dialers to intelligent contextual IVR engines, and security tools.
With this connected ecosystem, companies still have the freedom to build the bespoke contact center toolkit they need, while also benefiting from the simplicity of a single point of contact for CX technology. UJET offers an insight into how a single vendor can allow contact centers to converge and consolidate, connecting voice and digital communication channels with:
- Workforce Management: Comprehensive workforce management platforms with simple, scalable, and flexible forecasting, scheduling, and adherence monitoring, all on an easy-to-use platform that adapts to the needs of each team.
- Security and privacy: Intelligent security, privacy, and compliance solutions from UJET allow companies to defend their data and protect customers, with fingerprint validation, and advanced real-time data exchange.
- Advanced analytics: Extensive reporting and analytics tools provide companies with the insights they need to surface insights from interactions on every channel, identifying trends, patterns, pain points, and opportunities for growth.
- Intelligent routing: Intelligent, contextual routing engines empower businesses to implement dynamic routing strategies, designed to improve first-call resolution rates, customers satisfaction scores, and employee productivity.
Pioneering Innovation Through Partnerships
Vendors invested in empowering companies to converge and consolidate the contact center stack like UJET don’t just offer customizable toolkits to business leaders, they also work with partners to extend the functionality of their tools, and offer access to state-of-the-art innovations.
For instance, UJET’s partnership with Google Cloud ensures UJET customers can take advantage of one of the most scalable and secure AI-powered CCaaS solutions on the market, without working with more than a single vendor for support. UJET’s partnership with Google Cloud, and the Google Cloud Contact Center AI platform opens the door to a complete, cloud-native solution, enhanced by UJET’s expertise and phenomenal customer service strategy.
By partnering with cloud and technology pioneers like Google, UJET gives its clients more freedom to experiment with intuitive ways to transform the customer journey. Currently, the contact center platform vendor is working with Google to expand the Contact Center AI solution suite, combining world-leading generative AI technologies, with WFM, analytics, and omnichannel tools.
Recently named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI platform, Google just updated its CCAI solution to feature revolutionary tools like the Gen App Builder, which allows companies to build intuitive generative AI bots that can provide personalized support, manage transactions, and even process returns.
“The explosion of Generative AI over the last year represents an inflection point in the contact center market where artificial intelligence is moving from theory and hype to not only practical, but mission critical for brands to remain competitive,” stated Johnson. “Customer Service is the single greatest enterprise use case for AI today, and the most customer-focused organizations are thinking far beyond self-service to automated and ‘self-healing’ workflow creation, deep-learning-based topic and offer modelling, and the creation of their own enterprise-specific LLM’s that combine publicly sourced vertical and horizontal foundation models with their own proprietary data for highly tailored business and customer analyses and generative output.”
The Gen App Builder enhances the existing toolkit in the CCAI environment, making it simple for companies to create streamlined bots with prebuilt components, convenient business logic maps, and instructions delivered in natural language.
These bots, used for both agent support and customer self-service, integrate seamlessly with the toolkit offered by UJET, giving companies the opportunity to create intelligent routing strategies with their new generative AI agents, or implement WFM tools and insights into workflows, to enhance team productivity and conversation efficiency.
UJET’s out-of-the-box features in the Google CCAI ecosystem ensure companies can combine AI insights and bots with solutions to optimize staffing across all communication channels, eliminate manual forecasting, and transform team results.
Achieving True Synergy in the Contact Center
Converging and consolidating the distributed parts of the contact center and customer experience landscape delivers endless benefits to business leaders. From reduced costs and complexity to greater productivity and employee engagement, a synchronized ecosystem brings synergy to the workforce.
With pioneers like UJET, companies can access the flexible tools they need to enhance customer satisfaction and retention rates. UJET combines a flexible portfolio of connected solutions, with world-leading partnerships, to unlock the true potential of the modern contact center. With UJET’s help, business leaders can not only consolidate their contact center solutions, but also take their technology to the next level, unlocking new forms of innovation for the next era of customer service.
