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: