Contact Center of the Future: Digital Transformation Best Practices

Customer service is not the same as it once was. To keep up with customers’ growing expectations, it’s important for brands to re-imagine their service organizations – from their customers’ points of view.

Deploying the Digital Contact Center of the Future Today

Today’s customer expectations are higher than ever. They want personalized and timely customer support, across all digital channels. Whether speaking with an associate directly or utilizing automated self-service, they expect all channels to be connected. That is why the contact center of the future is not a siloed, multichannel call center, but an omnichannel contact center that provides a 360-degree view of the entire customer journey.

A key aspect of successful CX and digital transformation is contact center transformation in which digital technologies for customer insights, call deflection, personalization, and automation are optimized to turn your old fashioned call center into a contact center of the future.

A cloud based contact center provides a gamut of customer data to analyze and act on – including customer feedback from voice calls, mobile, social media, email, SMS/MMS, IVR, and other touchpoints - all from a single console. A 360 degree view of customer behaviors – such as the last transaction a customer has made with the company or the last channel they used – allows contact center associates to provide relevant, personalized, and real-time support that resolves customers concerns quickly and efficiently.

Call Center Digital Transformation begins with intelligent routing and omnichannel orchestration

A well designed IVR menu and Intelligent routing are also critical to creating the contact center of the future. Modern call routing capabilities provide customers with fluid experiences. Ultra-modern intelligent routing technologies provide additional functionality, including robust reporting and metrics tracking capabilities. These include the ability for contact center leaders to view the types of calls you that have been received, how quickly calls have been answered, and where they’ve been routed. These abilities extend beyond simple call detail records (CDR) as real time speech analytics can be used to improve voice of the customer Insights.

Companies that are able to provide customers with the kind of live associate support that they crave – namely, personalized, relevant, and timely responses – will differentiate themselves through the omnichannel contact center support they provide to their customers. They’ll also achieve higher customer loyalty and satisfaction which will translate into increased revenue, profits, and customer lifetime value. At the same time, the best contact center transformations also require strategic implementation of contact center automation best practices to improve center efficiency, associate onboarding and training, and to optimize the customer experiences.

Automation, AI, and Machine Learning are Essential to Contact Center Digital Transformation

In 2021 and beyond, contact center automation is accelerating, so it is essential for companies to implement best practices, or risk falling behind the competition. ' Technological advances in robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and machine learning (ML) are literally changing the face of customer care. However, just because you can automate something in the contact center doesn’t mean you should. To know which tasks to turn over to artificial intelligence and a machine is a challenge.

To explore the pros and cons of specific digital contact center automation tools in more detail, our digital consulting experts have created a series of cheat sheets, which take a lighthearted look a different aspects of contact center automation.

6 Tips to Prevent Customers from Saying “Agent” on Repeat: learn how to leverage next-gen IVR technology to make your call automation software work for customers, not against them.

3 Strategies for Avoiding Bot Failures in Your Contact Center: learn best practices for training AI and implementing chatbots before letting them interact with customers as well as the single most important aspect of successful chatbot implementations.

5 Reasons Why Fancy Automation Tools Don’t Automatically Improve CX: learn why entering the ‘Race to CX Automation’ by making big investments in contact center AI software — with big dreams of winning over customers easier and faster, is not enough. It takes more than fancy contact center automation tools to reach a contact center’s final CX automation destination.