As contact centres transition away from on-premise software, the CCaaS market is surging, so much so that the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Zoom are throwing their hat into the ring.
Yet, as this tower of hats grows taller by the day, it is becoming increasingly tricky for contact centre leaders to pinpoint which CCaaS solution is the best possible fit for their operation.
Fortunately, our industry specialists are perfectly positioned to steer them in the right direction, offering golden insights that will ensure evaluating CCaaS solutions is smooth sailing.
In this edition of the CX Today roundtable, our expert panellists include:
- Mark Beeston - Pre Sales Manager at Enghouse Interactive
- David Evans - Head of Product Management at Vonage
- Natalee Wiggins - Contact Centre Specialist at Twilio
- Wendy Mikkelsen - Senior Director of Product Marketing at Sprinklr
- Ted Hunting - Senior Vice President of Marketing at Bright Pattern
- Atif Rashid - Solutions Director of Transformation at Webhelp
- Nuri Gocay - Chief Solutions Officer at Local Measure
- Richard Dumas - VP of Product Marketing, and Blake Nelson, VP of Services Operations at Five9
Unpack all of their invaluable advice and top-notch tips below as they grapple with a series of questions often asked by those assessing CCaaS solutions.
Which Omnichannel Features of a CCaaS Solution Are Mission-Critical for the Modern Contact Centre?
Beeston: The modern omnichannel CCaaS solution should provide, as a minimum, the following mission-critical features:
- Reliability, security, and high availability.
- Relevant capabilities to the smallest and largest organisations across many vertical markets.
- Almost zero IT resource requirements and no infrastructure investment at all.
- Availability as a flexible ‘SaaS’ model with a choice of contract terms, so companies enjoy the latest omnichannel customer engagement functionality and instant scalability, business agility, and analytics that combine to create the best possible customer experience.
- Scalability to support evolving contact centre operations.
- Support for all customer channels, including voice, email, chat, SMS, social media, and video.
- Workflows that allow agents to handle a blend of different interaction types simultaneously.
- Recording and reporting, both real-time and historical, across the entire estate.
- Simple customisation and branding features to increase value and relevance for users.
- Rich and flexible feature functionality to support end-users and drive CX.
- A significant scope for modernisation and transformation strategies.
- Robust CRM integration capabilities, giving agents critical customer context to enhance and personalize contact handling.
Evans: It is critical to integrate the CCaaS solution with a CRM platform to optimise omnichannel capabilities and every customer conversation. Whether it is SMS, email, automated chat, or a phone call, agents must have the correct information on-hand to handle each query effectively.
Creating a real-time link with the CRM enables organisations to offer customers a seamless, personalised, omnichannel support experience.
In doing so, contact centres may improve critical metrics, including first call resolution (FCR) rates, hold time, and customer satisfaction scores, alongside empowering employees and increasing ROI.
Wiggins:
The ability to identify a customer, understand their intent, and route them to the most appropriate service or channel based on their desired outcome is fundamental to the modern contact centre operation.
Indeed, each interaction must route to the right destination. Whether through automated self-service or a human, operations must meet the customer’s desired outcome on their first contact.
Also, providing a consistent experience across all interactions and tracking customer context as they switch between channels and different areas of a business is paramount. In doing so, companies may isolate improvement opportunities and deliver actual value to customers.
Mikkelsen: First, a digital-led, unified contact centre architecture that offers a single view of all interactions across channels – including voice, chat, messaging, apps, email, and social media. Unifying siloed systems for a 360-degree view of customer care is a top priority for many companies.
Second, robust digital self-service capabilities, including an SEO optimized knowledge base, AI-moderated community forums, and chatbots that reduce customer churn and decrease costs. Maximizing these online self-service options will significantly impact overall contact volumes.
Third, conversational analytics that exploits advanced AI to assess customer conversations and agent responses in real-time. It then uses actionable data to deliver proactive and more personalized care.
However, many companies have limited or missing sets of conversation and CX data, which impacts the effectiveness of each feature. After all, their existing contact centre systems were not designed to understand unstructured conversation data.
Fortunately, conversation analytics uses AI to understand intent, sentiment, emotion, and valuable patterns across voice and digital interactions. It also provides a real-time, accurate view of CSAT and quality, which may optimize routing strategies.
Hunting: First, the solution should offer omnichannel capabilities, facilitating a single continuous conversation across all channels. Yet, most contact centres are still multichannel, not true omnichannel.
Over the years, vendors have confused companies as many claim to offer omnichannel, but they are multichannel - i.e., they have the channels, but they are siloed. They don’t work as a single conversation. Such a system requires a unified omnichannel desktop to see every interaction across each channel and the complete journey history at their fingertips.
Secondly, the CCaaS solution should include emerging channels like messaging (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) as customer preferences turn digital. McKinsey highlight the speed of this transition, noting how digital channel adoption vaulted forward five years in eight weeks due to the pandemic, and these new channels are what is next. In the future, they will likely overtake live chat in volume.
Thirdly, Gartner and other prominent analysts report CX is a top-three priority for enterprises and mid-size companies, yet most people only measure QA across the voice channel. Yet, companies often still only sample one percent of calls.
So, companies should consider a CCaaS solution that includes omnichannel quality management and monitors 100% of interactions on every channel. After all, it is tricky to improve CX if it is impossible to measure.
Finally, consider remote and mobile capabilities, which are quick to deploy. These include empowerment tools, helping agents do their job with knowledge bases and customer info at their fingertips, alongside agent-assist and subject matter expert support channels that replicate hands-on support systems.
Rashid: A CCaaS solution must deliver seamless identification and routing across channels, especially when a channel shift occurs.
Identifying conversational context and intent is critical. A concierge capability, which triages the reason for contact while attempting a degree of self-service through automation, is popular in the service realm.
To achieve this, the CCaaS solution must integrate with critical data environments and CRM tools to understand the triage and decision-making process. Investing in the necessary APIs, data lakes, AI, or rules-based decision engines can transform the business through complementary CCaaS tooling.
Such integrations are critical for disruptive transformation. A CCaaS marketplace offering allows digital-first deployment capabilities - such as asynchronous messaging with out of the box integration, written automation, intuitive triage-based web forms, and conversational bots that act as virtual assistants.
Employee experience is also critical. The end state should provide a single unified desktop view. After all, the industry is moving to customer service specialists rather than a dedicated voice, chat, or email agent.
The optimal CCaaS solutions should render applications into this Unified Desktop view, while integrations must work symbiotically to achieve the ideal business, customer, and employee outcomes.
Gocay: Many solutions claim to be "omnichannel", yet customers rarely receive unified experiences. Most feel like they are talking to different departments. Unless channels tie back to a customer profile, companies merely collect a host of unrelated data, which provides no insights that will enhance service experiences.
Asynchronous messaging is also becoming widespread, which links to the broader trend of allowing customers to contact when, where, and how they want, rather than when the company dictates.
To create an omnichannel customer experience, seamless integration of all online and offline channels is essential. Such a capability also enables everyone in the organisation to become an agent.
So, for instance, if a customer wishes to check stock, the call routes automatically to the relevant store. There, the employee should see contact centre history on their mobile or desktop devices. With a next-generation modern CCaaS solution, all this is possible.
Which Native Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) Tools Are Now Essential to the Employee Experience?
Beeston: CCaaS solutions should integrate with external Workforce Management applications to enhance forecasting, scheduling and intraday management process with agent and interaction data.
Ideally, standard WFM Connectors will come with the CCaaS solution and integrate with market leaders, including Calabrio and Verint.
Many will also offer native WFM capabilities, but some choose not to. For instance, Enghouse Interactive does not as many environments prefer to use, and are highly familiar with, their existing WFM application.
Instead, with its Calabrio integration, users can harness a market-leading WFM offering. Indeed, the Calabrio solution allows employees to request vacation time and swap shifts via a comprehensive portal while keeping them notified of scheduled breaks during the working day.
Evans: WFM solutions are helpful, particularly in larger contact centres, to optimise resources by combining scheduling and forecasting. A single, pre-integrated platform from a single vendor connects WFM and telephony seamlessly, allowing the contact centre to enhance schedules consistently to meet service level agreements.
In addition, operations may accurately predict demand by harnessing existing data to improve and automate staffing calculations.
Coaching solutions that allow supervisors to drop into any inbound or outbound call in real-time, directly through the CRM, are highly beneficial too. Many utilise a "whisper" mode to offer on-the-spot coaching and review to identify excellent improvement opportunities.
A gamification option rewards employees when they reach a personal or business goal. The fun, game-type elements create engaging activities out of everyday tasks to encourage the team, discourage negative behaviour, and promote office-wide altruism.
Wiggins: Every agent needs the right tools to do their job, which involves having the right information at the right time to resolve the customer queries quickly.
As such, the focus needs to be on the agent desktop. After all, seamlessly surfacing relevant information for every interaction is the biggest driver for delivering a good employee experience.
Alongside this, being proactive and communicating across teams while empowering them to do the right things goes a long way.
Mikkelsen: Automated quality management ensures that customer service and agent performance are consistent while enabling supervisors to monitor employee experiences.
In addition, with automated quality management, companies can track agent interactions using AI to reveal where and how teams can improve in real-time. Doing so may highlight coaching opportunities for agents while eliminating manual quality assurance processes and time-consuming compliance management.
Hunting: First, equip agents with the tools to remotely schedule shifts from a desktop or mobile phone. Having this ability offers the work-life balance that is critical to morale.
Unfortunately, most WFM plans are not so mature. Indeed, most contact centres focus primarily on scheduling and forecasting voice calls, but they do not adequately schedule omnichannel interactions. A true omnichannel WFM capability enables companies to balance efficiency with effectiveness to maximize resources.
Pre-built integrations to solutions like Microsoft Teams are also invaluable. These enable agents to connect with SMEs anywhere in the organisation, on every channel, whether it is a phone call, chat or messenger conversation.
Rashid: With the shift in remote working communication, visibility, flexibility, quality management, and enhanced security have become paramount for an effective WEM environment.
Leading CCaaS vendors have effective mature WEM tooling that paves the way for these capabilities. Yet, integration to Unified Comms and conference tools enables additional functionalities.
For instance, brands can utilise Microsoft Teams or Zoom to interact with remote teams and provide invaluable support channels.
Also, the use of analytics tools such as Power BI and Tableau have increased to provide the necessary visibility to measure and observe teams and organisational performance.
Then, there is gamification, which transforms motivational and reward programmes rather than driving traditional sales, creating a new cultural shift with increased employee engagement.
Finally, advanced CRM and workflow tooling integrate with CCaaS and WEM software, allowing planners and organisations to build advanced flexibility for colleagues without impacting service levels or customer experience.
Gocay: The shift from workforce management to workforce engagement is well underway. This trend comes as more contact centres recognise the benefit of an engaged agent is the difference between an exceptional service experience and an average one.
No longer should cold and impersonal metrics rule the roost. Instead, data-driven empowerment and engagement must come to the fore. Supplying agents with real-time feedback - alongside access to the data they need, when they need it - complements excellent EX and CX.
Such feedback should channel through agent devices. For this reason - alongside others - the desktop experience is a significant contact centre consideration.
Leaders must mull over which screens agents look at, the number of tabs they open, the ease of navigation, and the accessibility of customer information. By understanding this context, contact centres can streamline processes - possibly with robotic process automation (RPA) - to engage agents and facilitate better customer conversations.
Which CCaaS Tools Bring the Modern-Day Cognitive Contact Centre to Life?
Beeston: Beyond the table-stakes features discussed previously, there is an emerging suite of tools taking contact centre intelligence to the next level. These include: