Today’s contact center is a world apart from the legacy ecosystems many organizations are used to. Virtual environments have replaced offices full of ringing phones. Customers want to reach businesses through the channel that best fits their current situation: phone, email, webchat, or social media. Using the same channels, the cloud-based customer service application (CCaaS) tracks client interactions and customer journeys.
Some of the trends influencing customer experience are:
- Enterprise leaders want to deliver enhanced customer experience.
- Evolving trends in AI.
- AI & chatbots are changing the way queries are resolved today.
- Road to cloud migration.
- Evolving workforce management.
By switching communications from legacy, on-premises systems to cloud-based software, one can benefit from higher reliability, worldwide carrier connectivity, and much more flexible scalability.
Barriers to Cloud Migration and Opportunity Areas
In addition to barriers such as regulatory compliance, security, skills gaps, vendor lock-in, and financial cost, employee resistance is another obstacle to a successful migration. Employees may resist due to factors such as their comfort level with current working practices, anxiety around how this change will affect workloads, or ignorance of the features that a cloud-based contact center has to offer.
A successful migration requires a strategy, which should involve setting goals together as a team, selecting features that are necessary now and, in the future, emphasizing the user experience, and introducing technology gradually.
CCaaS Trends that Vendors Need to Embrace for a Successful Migration
The contact center industry is facing rapid and intensive change, driven by changing buying behavior and technological demands for new working models. An on-premises contact center offers control over infrastructure, peace of mind when it comes to security (since it is managed in-house), and less delays; however, it lacks in scalability, and has limited integration capabilities, not to mention a high upfront cost for setting it up. A contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) not only offers flexibility in scalability and reduced cost but can also manage multiple communication channels such as SMS texting, email, video calling, website chat, and social media messaging in addition to VOIP calling.
For a successful migration, CCaaS vendor should offer multilingual support, workforce engagement management, service-level agreement (SLA) support, regulatory compliance, and integration capability as part of their offering. End-users should collaborate with CCaaS providers who have a clear technology roadmap for increasing the features and capabilities of their platforms and who are keeping pace with emerging transformative trends. For instance, due to growing customer demands for more information and first-contact resolution, there is a need for UCaaS and CCaaS to work together. UCaaS and CCaaS together let agents connect with subject matter experts and collaborate in a shared space. Another trend is customers’ demand for self-service tools, which is predicted to increase with the offering of self-reliant channels such as live chats and chatbots. Rather than directly contacting the call centers to get their issues resolved, users can use the self-service tools, which provide convenience and rapid response. Vendors should also invest in IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and ACD (Automatic call distribution). Although IVR and ACD technology are two very different modules of a contact center environment, they often work in tandem with each other. In most cloud-based contact centers, organizations are creating intelligent IVR and ACD systems capable of making significant improvements to the customer experience. An intelligent IVR can assess the needs of the customer better and offer better opportunities for self-service by passing the call over to the ACD with more contextual information.
According to Umang Thakur, Associate Director at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions “Making any significant changes in the business landscape can be a complicated process. It is natural to experience resistance to the adoption of new technologies. To leverage all the benefits of CCaaS, organizations must create a CCaaS strategy that gets everyone on board. By implementing a multi-cloud solution and migrating operations in batches, organizations don’t have to invest as much money up front and don’t have to rely on one vendor. Also, by developing a clear skill strategy, cultivating cloud skills internally, and taking advantage of training programs, organizations can overcome the skill gap barrier. CCaaS providers are also starting to extend their infrastructure for multiregional deployments by adding more data centers, media gateways, and language capabilities.”
Author
Umang Thakur, Associate Director, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.
