3 Ways to Future-proof Your Cloud Contact Center

The past three years has seen a marked rise in the use of digital channels, the explosion of available data, rising customer expectations, and a visible shift to cloud contact center technologies. Yet only 25 percent of contact center decision-makers are completely satisfied with the performance of their CCaaS solution, according to a new study by Forrester Research commissioned by SuccessKPI.

Enterprises about to undertake a cloud migration and those building a greenfield contact center in the cloud can both learn from these early cloud adopters from across all industry segments. This article shares many of the common cloud migration challenges gleaned from real–world contact deployments and suggests strategies and lessons learned based on some of the world’s largest cloud contact center migrations.  

The value of a holistic CX journey across channels is undisputed, yet the term “omnichannel” still gathers snickers for being more hype than reality. A true 360 view of the customer experience is required for CX success and it is now possible to achieve it with with emerging tools. SuccessKPI – a cloud-native platform that is vendor agnostic – exists to make this multi-channel, cloud–first reality a place where data is easily understood. The SuccessKPI cloud toolset leverages the power of a rich BI-layer and data lake to bring structure and unity so contact centers can leverage historical and real-time information across any data source to drive insight and action for your enterprise. 

Data remains the lifeblood of modern contact centers, and a key advantage of a cloud toolset is the ability to unify complex sets of data points even before the migration begins. When enterprises move to the cloud — as part of a cloud migration or toolset upgrade — there is no time to stop business as usual while the new solution is being implemented. Even for the most forward-looking enterprise, key functionality must be maintained to keep the business moving first. At SuccessKPI we empower enterprises undergoing major changes to achieve pixel-perfect report replication with these steps: 

• Identify key reports used to run the business
• Ingest data from disparate sources (CRM, Surveys, channels)
• Enable seamless migration to new platform and keep data
• Replicate existing reporting
• Setup subscriptions to enable external stakeholders to monitor progress

By identifying key reports and ingesting data prior to migration, stakeholders can gain immediate access to critical information in a familiar format so they may continue to make data-informed business decisions on day one of cloud deployment. With reduced interruptions and contextually similar information, businesses can maintain key operations while leaping ahead with new enhanced insights into customer behavior, agent performance, and overall contact center operations.

AI and automation are transforming the contact center landscape, from increasing efficiency to improving the overall customer experience. Businesses slow to embrace digital transformation don’t only risk falling behind – they may be missing out on a critical opportunity to drive direct cost savings and increase incremental revenue by 57%.  

By leveraging AI and automation, contact centers can tap into these evolving efficiency accelerants: 90+% accurate transcription, 100% machine learning powered automated call scoring, real-time agent coaching and guidance, automated disposition coding, and many more.

Insight leads to business outcomes when it enables action – which is precisely the reason SuccessKPI makes it simple for business users to build automated plays for critical functions based on customer conversations in real-time. These actions can be invoked during a live conversation or after the conversation and can be based on call sentiment, keywords, themes, or metrics. Conditions and rules can be activated immediately using an “If this, then that” (ITTT) user interface framework to automate timely tasks, such as PII redaction, sending SMS and email, flagging calls for QA evaluation, executing web transactions. Some examples of where such actions can help include: 

• Operational efficiency: Pinpoint how your organization can reduce the time it takes to meet customer needs. Gain understanding of what triggers customers to initiate interactions and feed this knowledge back into your business processes to decrease operational costs. 
• Customer retention: Identify early signs of customer vulnerability and take steps to support those customers throughout their interactions with the organization. Correlate sentiment with customer retention using our enterprise BI-layer.
• Compliance: Monitor how well you meet regulatory procedures and requirements for customer interactions, and how well your team identifies, monitors, and manages poor vs. successful customer outcomes.

The overall success of most companies is directly correlated to the customer experience it provides. The foundation of a truly great contact center is the employees serving customers on the front lines. Thus, prioritizing the agent experience has a direct impact on the customer experience. When agents are empowered with the right tools and resources, they provide faster, more accurate, and more personalized service to customers. This is especially important in environments where self-service and AI-driven support already handles many of the simpler tasks. Agents face increasingly complex inquiries in this case. The value of putting the agent first with automated assistance, personalized coaching, and fluid cloud migration is clear:

• Higher employee retention: When agents feel valued and receive coaching for further growth, they are more likely to stay with the company long-term, reducing turnover and associated hiring and training costs.
• Cost savings: Reduce the amount of time agents spend on each inquiry by equipping agents with live coaching and guidance, leading to cost savings for the company.
• Competitive advantage: When agents are happy and productive, they are more likely to provide exceptional service to customers, which can differentiate the company from its competitors and lead to increased customer loyalty and retention.

The future contact center is clearly in the cloud. The Forrester study clearly shows that this is not an easy transition; however, a smoother path is possible and reachable as 90% agree that cloud toolset is essential to managing the complexity of reporting migration and to achieve the benefits of AI-powered automation. By putting the agent and the customer experience at the center, cloud toolsets enable insight and action drive contact center excellence from the agent to the CEO.

If you are a business leader looking to optimize your cloud contact center performance for better outcomes, replay the on-demand webinar Unlocking Cloud Success for a conversation I am hosting with guest speaker Forrester Senior Analyst Vasupradha Srinivasan on how you can take action to unlock the most value from your cloud contact center.