The last five years has drastically transformed how we communicate and engage – both internally with team members, and externally with customers
Employees are interacting through a host of channels, from social media to SMS, live chat, and email – and some continue to use the phone. Plus, customers expect to connect with companies through the same solutions. To address this change, many companies have embraced unified communications, and the market is growing.
However, unified communications systems alone may not be enough to address the changing expectations and demands of the contact center. To enable and enhance hybrid and remote work, improve compliance and boost customer satisfaction, companies need an all-in-one solution.
Top Tips for Meeting Evolving Contact Center Requirements
Unified Communications platforms can be valuable and do meet the needs of many organizations, supporting collaboration among hybrid workers, and omnichannel communication. The trouble is, many companies are relying on multiple applications at once. When they add a contact center solution into the mix, they end up with a complex, expensive, and siloed environment.
The gaps between technology systems, and the complexity of this ecosystem has a significant impact on contact center results. In fact, 58% of contact center leaders say fragmentation in their communications strategy has a negative impact on customer satisfaction.
So, how can companies transform their operations and overcome evolving challenges?
1. Prepare Employees for Complex Customer Interactions
Customer interactions are becoming increasingly complex. Not only are consumers navigating experiences with companies across multiple disconnected channels, but they’re solving many simpler issues alone, using AI and self-service resources. Around 67% of customers say they prefer self-service over speaking to a contact center agent directly.
By the time customers reach your agents, they’ll be expecting fast, intuitive support, without the need to repeat themselves. This means companies need a true omnichannel contact center solution, that unifies context and data across every channel. Bridging CCaaS and UC solutions ensures you can prepare your employees for complex experiences, by giving them access to comprehensive data.
It ensures you can align information from previous discussions with relevant documents and resources, as well as sentiment and conversational insights. Additionally, connecting UC and CCaaS technologies ensures your team members can collaborate easily with subject matter experts and other team members on complicated customer queries.
2. Unify Analytics and Insights
Data is crucial to delivering not just better, more personalized customer experiences, but also ensuring your company can make the most of its available resources. When UC systems, contact centers, and other critical tools are disconnected in the workplace, collecting the right data is complex.
An all-in-one solution for reporting and analytics throughout both the contact center, and the wider business environment, paves the way for stronger decision making. For instance, can automatically track custom metrics, ranging from employee utilization insights, to customer sentiment, helping you to gather more complete, meaningful data.
With the ability to integrate both your UC and CCaaS analytics with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, , companies can use insights to deliver more personalized and engaging experiences to customers.
With integrations for WFM (Workforce Management) and ERP tools, companies can even use the insights they gain to determine how to allocate resources cost-effectively. Plus, an integrated solution for analytics and reporting paves the way for proactive customer service experiences. The more data you have, the more you can anticipate future customer needs, and trends.
3. Embrace AI and Automation
Artificial intelligence and automation are redefining how contact centers and companies operate on an incredible scale. However, the power of these solutions is often limited when teams are restricted to using different workflows and AI systems for different processes.
Employees shouldn’t have to use one AI tool to summarize meetings within their office, and another to transcribe and analyze conversations in the contact center. Instead, organizations should be able to embed intelligent solutions and automation into every workflow.
With an end-to-end system for all interactions and experiences, companies can leverage the same tools to automate workflows like call routing and management, task assignment, and data summarization. They can also tap into AI to help with everything from improving self-service experiences, to analyzing data, and delivering real-time assistance to agents and employees.
An end-to-end solution for AI and automation will improve employee experiences, while also helping to reduce operational costs, improve decision making, and
4. Adapt Security and Compliance Strategies
Today’s contact centers are facing an ever-increasing range of security and compliance challenges. The rise of AI in the contact center, as well as omnichannel communications, has led to new regulations and laws governing how companies collect and use data.
To maintain the trust of their target audience and avoid fines, business leaders need to update their security and compliance strategies, introducing a unified approach to managing a growing data ecosystem. An all-in-one platform that allows companies to monitor threats across unified communications systems, and the contact center, helps to minimize security risks.
It ensures companies can monitor threats across all channels in real-time, collect the correct holistic data for auditing purposes, without having to use separate governance strategies, and leverage state-of-the-art security tools, such as voice biometrics and multi-factor authentication.
5. Optimize for Remote and Hybrid Work
Finally, despite some companies attempting to encourage employees back into office environments, demand for hybrid work continues to grow. While unified communications platforms can help to enable and support hybrid workers, productivity often suffers when teams need to use separate systems for internal and external communications.
For remote and hybrid workers to thrive in the contact center, they need a system that allows them to use their personal devices, when necessary, and access a single pane of glass solution for leveraging data and connecting with team members. Creating a cloud-native environment that enables access to CPaaS, UCaaS, and CCaaS in one space helps to reduce app switching and boost productivity.
An all-in-one environment will ensure teams anywhere in the world can access the support they need from team members, wherever they might be, during the flow of customer interactions. It ensures teams can share data securely and efficiently, access resources on the move, and deliver a consistent experience to customers.
Beyond Unified Communications: Create Unified Experiences
The evolving expectations of customers, combined with the transformation of the contact center landscape, has introduced new challenges for organizations. Alone, Unified Communications tools can’t provide all of the resources and tools businesses need to thrive.
However, a unified system, that combines UC, contact center solutions, and other technologies into one ecosystem empowers businesses to reduce costs, boost productivity, and enhance customer service. In fact, 8×8’s research shows companies who use a single, cloud-based provider for all of their communication tools increase revenue by 99.6%, decrease costs by 14.4%, improve CX by 56.6%, and enhance agent efficiency by 37.4%.
Contact 8×8 to learn more about how you can transform your contact center, improve customer experiences, and enhance productivity with a truly unified solution.
