While an innovative CX vision is often helpful in building differentiated customer journeys, delivering that with a large-scale, big-bang cloud project is perhaps not the best approach. Indeed, such programmes frequently come in over budget, at a snail’s pace, and reduced down to an anaemic version of the original intent.
A Harvard Business Review article recognises this when assessing the success of AI-enhanced CX projects, concluding that: “Ambitious moon shots are less likely to be successful than “low-hanging fruit” projects that enhance business processes.”
There are many such business processes that companies can enhance with CPaaS. Addressing these one at a time to secure the “low-hanging fruit” builds confidence in cloud-enabled transformation.
The Ideal Entry Point to CPaaS
Many brands that wish to dip their toe into the CPaaS water start by attempting to lower the strain on customer service teams and reduce information-driven contact centre traffic.
Determining why customers call in real-time is the first step. Then, the company can harness the digital deflection capabilities of CPaaS to offer an alternative solution if it is available.
For instance, a voicebot that understands intent can gather the necessary information – from the purchase management system, company knowledge base, or another enterprise system – and send it to the customer via SMS. It can send a smart form, allowing customers to self-serve and change their details within the CRM when they move house, change their phone number, etc.
Discussing the role of technology within such a use case, Nick Dicksee, an Avaya CPaaS Specialist Lead, says:
“CPaaS makes the solution possible through increasing ease of integrations and accessibility to digital channels that businesses may not have previously enjoyed access to, due to constraints around their existing solution.”
Next, contact centres often aim to evolve their voicebots by adding conversational AI for self-service and using it to streamline security processes once the original use case starts to showcase a significant return on investment (ROI).
Stay Strategic – Don’t Throw Jelly at the Wall!
After underlining the value of CPaaS and establishing confidence in the technology, the options become almost limitless. As such, companies can focus on more strategic opportunities that differentiate their customer experiences.
Indeed, businesses may harness the power of APIs to add new channels, integrate those, and tackle the most pressing CX transformation use cases.
According to Dicksee, many of these pressing use cases – including proactive customer communication – are often enabled through API connections with the CRM. He says:
“Embedding APIs into the CRM allows the automation of particular tasks, flows, events to trigger outbound communications to inform, adjust, and optimise customer behaviour.”
Of course, such use cases have to be relevant to the experiences the company wants to offer. As Dicksee says: “A business can’t throw jelly at the wall and see what sticks.” Yet, the opportunity to do proof of concepts, tests, and an agile sprint toward a CX vision through CPaaS is much easier and cost-effective than when compared to its hardware predecessors.
Building a Differentiated Experience
Avaya, a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, is continually striving to enrich its platform, ensuring more integrations are available outside of those native to its solution. Companies can then easily embed new technologies into their ecosystem, even those they create themselves through Avaya’s “bring your own AI” initiative.
Such innovation and choice allow companies to build experiences that align best with their values. Also, the trend towards no-code/low-code technologies orchestration platforms further enables this, as CX teams can get closer to the design of new solutions – which was previously developer and partner territory. Then, they may develop solutions to deliver against customer needs, not those of the IT team.
Meanwhile, developers may focus on adding the finesse that differentiates customer journeys. Not only is this more enjoyable, but they may also have the time to collaborate with other departments and build connections across the enterprise such as in Fusion Teams.
As such, CPaaS can kickstart this change in mindset that is crucial to the success of wide-scale digital transformation projects. As Dicksee says:
“Such technologies not only enable businesses to create and scale a contact centre much more easily, but they also compose experiences around the contact centre, UC platform, and other various enterprise solutions.”
It also helps generate intelligence and context that educates transformation while providing the stepping-stone to consuming the cloud without moving entire business functions.
Take a Phased Approach to CPaaS With Avaya
Businesses that were once cloud averse seem to be changing their tune. In fact, Gartner estimates that 95% of enterprise organizations will use CPaaS by 2026.
Yet, the big-bang approach is perhaps not the best way to satisfy those niggling cloud hesitations. Instead, Avaya offers a proven phased approach to the cloud through CPaaS, enabling enterprises to seize the most prominent benefits of the cloud without migrating their entire systems architecture.
Itching to learn more? Head to the Avaya website to check out its CPaaS solutions for your business.
