Living and working through the COVID-19 outbreak has been extremely tough – particularly so for agents working at the coal face in traditional contact centres. In a world where technology is constantly evolving, businesses have to demonstrate that they are consistently agile. However, adapting in the face of the rapid shift to remote working in recent months has been many organisations’ toughest business continuity test to date.
Maintaining smooth operations in the face of lockdown and social distancing regulations has relied heavily on cloud technology. Those organisations that had already integrated software as a service (SaaS) and contact centre as a service (CCaaS) platforms were already well-positioned to react to the global impact brought on by COVID-19. Alternatively, many contact centres, reliant on legacy on-premises infrastructure, were forced to seek a future-facing solution.
Not All CCaaS Solutions Are Created Equal
Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Co-founder of Content Guru, explains that the COVID-19 crisis has provided a fast-acting stimulant for industry-wide innovation, and in doing so has changed the traditional contact centre forever. “The need to ensure not only continuous operations, but a consistent customer experience, has forced many organisations to rethink their traditional contact centre,” says Taylor. “With the right CCaaS platform, businesses can be flexible and agile enough to withstand any business continuity risk – even one as widespread and impactful as a global pandemic.”
This is where Content Guru has proven itself as Europe’s leading Customer Engagement and Experience solution. Its storm® suite of cloud-based products aligns intelligent automation, third-party systems integration, and on-demand scalability to maximise customer communication reactivity. “The technology is browser-based so agents can log in from anywhere with an internet connection”, shares Taylor. “We’ve been able to move agents to remote work in just days for customers that already have the storm solution – for others it’s only marginally longer.”
Solutions That Empower Agents and Organisations
With its extensive omni-channel engagement capabilities, storm gives organisations the power to provide consistent and seamless experiences for customers, which in turn creates a loyal customer-brand relationship built on reliability and trust. This level of consistent customer experience excellence is amplified through the agile and flexible nature of the solution’s User Interface (UI). “Everything is browser-based, so all the great things like quality management, compliance, and data metrics all come with the agent wherever they are, all while maintaining the same level of supervision and support you would find in a traditional contact centre”, explains Taylor.
Not only can storm perform well as an independent solution, but it can also augment on-premise systems that are already in place with seamless integrations. Without interruption, Content Guru can provide an in-office organisation with the support it needs to implement remote capabilities in days instead of weeks. “We’ve had companies come to us that have been using an on-premise solution but need help to get people working from home to ensure social distancing in their contact centres,” says Taylor. “In one case we helped transition one-third of agents to work from home safely by adding our storm solution to their on-premise service.”
Integrated AI Makes for a Smooth Customer Journey
Through brain, Content Guru’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) toolkit, the solution is able to build a coherent bridge across different channels for customers. This ultimately reduces cost, increases service speed, and maximises agent use. Taylor explains:
“We use AI to identify a customer and their needs so that before they even get to an agent they are already directed to the right queue. When the conversation with an agent begins, the customer data has already been gathered”
Regardless of the point of entry, each customer is ushered along their individual journey without redundancy and with peak efficiency. Taylor goes on to say, “Even through chatbots, AI is integrated in a way that routes customers to the right department if they engage with an agent. Our artificially intelligent Machine Agents, or chatbots, can handle any straightforward ‘FAQ’-style queries a customer may have. This allows agents to handle more complex enquiries. The benefit here is both a better customer and agent experience throughout the interaction.”
Content Guru’s CCaaS solution can also integrate into a number of back-office collaboration systems, such as Microsoft Teams. This gives agents the ability to dial external numbers through Teams, as well as transfer phone calls to back-office subject matter experts who are best placed to advise customers.
It is cutting-edge capabilities like this that are ushering in the dawn of the ‘knowledge agent’ – one single point of customer contact who can collaborate quickly with the wider organisation to solve any customer query. Matched with a more flexible, cloud-based and resilient contact centre, it seems that CCaaS is supporting a rapid, industry-wide evolution of the traditional contact centre of old.
