Contact center transformation is at the top of the agenda for many businesses.
Why? Chiefly because legacy vendors are making their aim to move customers to the cloud much more explicit.
Yet, there are many more reasons. The strategic importance of customer experience, the new possibilities AI brings to the contact center, and the increasing maturity of CCaaS solutions are excellent examples.
Unfortunately, contact center transformation projects are often steeped in complexity.
Consider large enterprises. Many have installed a plethora of tools over the years, creating a complex patchwork quilt of systems tightly sown together.
Every tweak may alter a business process, agent workflow, or reporting preset.
As such, frustrations are aplenty during contact center transformations, with the following five being some of the most pressing.
1. Bolt-On Channels Have Siloed Data
In recent years, consumers have begun using more channels to interact with sales and service teams. As a result, businesses have had to find new ways of introducing different platforms into their contact center environment.
Unfortunately, bolt-on strategies, which involve stitching additional functionality onto an existing ecosystem without intelligent integrations or APIs, can cause problems.
Simply purchasing a “WhatsApp” option for customer service doesn’t mean it will integrate seamlessly with the rest of an existing contact center.
As such, companies end up with siloed data and a fragmented view of the customer journey distributed across different ecosystems.
What You Can Learn
When a manager hits an integration barrier, they must consider: why does it happen? By doing so, they will likely learn lots!
Take these learnings into all future tech projects, and over time the team build a more agile customer service environment.
2. Superficial Systems Drive a Need for Custom Development
Like bolt-on channels, many contact center solutions – including older CRM, WFO, and helpdesk systems – are relatively superficial.
Sure, they provide companies with many settings to explore, but issues arise when the business needs to make them work with other contact center tools.
Unfortunately, this leads to greater expense and complexity in the long run. Moreover, as skilled developers become increasingly hard to find, many brands either hit a wall in their transformation efforts or pay through the roof for customer development.
What You Can Learn
Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder of babelforce, suggests: “Managers and IT teams must not only think about how to add a new system into the contact center environment but also consider: how are we going to change it later?”
“If elements of that change require code, the shortage of developers and IT may come back to sting the contact center down the road.”
For this reason, brands often turn to no-/low-code development, allowing them to respond and accelerate future transformation projects.
3. Few People Understand Mission-Critical Processes
There are countless crucial processes involved in managing any contact center. However, in many environments, only a handful of professionals know the ins and outs of essential processes within the company’s operation.
“It’s not uncommon that I will talk to an organization, and they need to get seven or eight people together to understand a process,” says Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder of babelforce.
“Significant elements of what we discuss are completely unclear unless we get John on the phone. But he might be away, and when we do get through to him, he says something completely different to everyone else. That is a very familiar situation during transformation initiatives.”
Yet, it’s incredibly challenging to make a new initiative work without a collective understanding of the behind-the-scenes processes that support contact center experiences.
More alarmingly, leaders risk investing in the wrong transformation tools.
What You Can Learn
Before investing in any digital transformation project, business leaders should map and document essential contact center processes.
Take the time to understand the workflows of each employee to truly understand how new tools and technologies can bolster customer, agent, and business outcomes.
4. Shiny Reporting Tools Fail to Do the Heavy Lifting
Excellent reporting is not the result of a shiny reporting suite or nifty dashboards. Of course, they help. But the data that fuels them comes from various sources.
Someone must have had the foresight to consider how to add data from all of these sources into the correct data records so that the contact center could report on it.
If garbage goes into the tools, garbage will come out. If there is no data in the first instance, there is no report to harness and inform contact center transformation efforts.
To ensure that reports are up to grade, the operation must do considerable concept work upfront – alongside testing and optimization.
Without this, the contact center cannot be sure it is driving the desired outcomes later in its transformation project.
What You Can Learn
Define the metrics most crucial to the transformation project’s success from day one.
Then, the business must figure out how to track these vital success metrics accurately before the transformation begins.
5. CX Changes Have Disrupted Agent Workflows
Many contact centers will buy into a new-wave, powerful CRM tool and have great plans for what to do with it. Yet, six months after deployment, agents have turned to time-consuming workarounds, and some contact centers are papering over the cracks of broken processes within the interface.
Such a scenario is not uncommon, according to Buckley. “There may be no shortcuts to switch between systems, so agents have to search expansive databases for information,” he says.
“Also, there could be fields available that agents shouldn’t fill out and can’t fill out, but they are taking up all the real estate and cognitive energy.
“Then, there are often processes that could be completed in the background but are not – such as retrieving customer information – which waste the agent’s time.”
Recent Gartner research suggests such issues are commonplace, finding that 45 percent of contact center agents avoid adopting new technologies.
More worryingly, all these unoptimized workflows add ten seconds to every interaction. That may not sound a lot, but in a 100-seat operation, that equates to millions of dollars every year.
What You Can Learn
Test the agent experience before deployment on a small group of agents first. Track their KPI changes, discuss the experience with them, and engage with the vendor about how to best tackle emerging issues.
Embrace Change, Don’t Fear It
Almost every business has a telephony system alongside case management and CRM tools. As such, people ask: why change now?
After all, the frustrations above certainly showcase how contact center transformation is often a troublesome, disruptive process.
Nevertheless, most telephony systems, and their integrations to ticketing and various other contact center systems, leave operations with many problems that they have learned to live with. These lead to increased costs and close-off revenue opportunities.
babelforce understands transformation challenges inside-out. They’ve helped some of Europe’s busiest contact centers achieve tremendous business benefits without disruption because their solution is built with the future in mind.
To learn more, visit: www.babelforce.com
