What keeps us up at night about contact center technology?

Over the past three years, we have been increasingly seeing tremendous advances in telecommunications technologies. Client systems are moving from digital to IP-based systems. Convergence of email, virtual agents, and videos are now widely used for client relationship management. Like most things in life, if the solution is properly designed and installed, it can have tremendous potential to improve your call center productivity and enable your people to efficiently communicate to save time and money.

That said, there are things that keep me awake at night, worrying about how our clients are going to deal with the challenges of moving to next generation IP-based communications, in a world that is quickly changing. What follows are four things that keep call center industry professionals up at night.

1. Choices, assessment, value, and implementation

As our customers continue to evaluate Unified Communications and cloud contact center solutions, we’ve seen areas where potential issues may arise.

There are so many choices and technology solutions to choose from, which can sometimes overwhelm a client. It’s also time-consuming to get accurate designs, complete timelines for deployment and specifications to make an informed decisions. Furthermore, getting agreements in place for support on next-generation IP platforms or cloud-based technologies can sometimes be a headache.

Managing the process and assessing the best solutions for implementation can be difficult as well. It is not easy to do it all and there are very few vendors who offer all of the support required to move your operation to the cloud, or a Unified Communications platform. Once you get your solutions implemented, it may also be difficult to manage and measure the vendor’s success, the overall deployment, and specific service levels and measure performance.

2. Social Media – What Apps and How?

Many of our clients are traditionalist. They’ve counted on us for voice and data services, so they struggle with effectively developing, managing, producing, and leveraging their brand across multiple social media apps. Social media apps are coming out all of the time, so it is even more difficult to keep up with which ones to deploy. Further, it’s quite a challenge to be able to quantify and prove the real business ROI. So what do you do?

Social media is about community. We’ve seen, again and again, that building the right community happens one conversation at a time. It’s not about blasting out your information; it’s about making sure that you are seen, recognized and remembered.

3. The right skills, knowledge, and processes are needed to navigate tomorrow’s contact center landscape.

We’ve seen our clients struggle to better understand how technology can improve their client experiences, through CRM contact centers, for example. At the same time, replacement technology solutions are causing challenges across their operations, between vendors, companies and users.

Resources have moved. They don’t have the background in customer service, or there are much more challenging issues to understand the technology. Often, we have been asked to come in and assess their operations to better understand their requirements.

4. The Future isn’t set in stone.

The future is hard to predict, design, and plan for. This is specifically true when it relates to skills, design, deployment, or support. Things change constantly. Given the accelerating pace of technology advancements, we at GCOM encourage all organizations to look at their network design on an annual basis.

It’s important to be creative and flexible on ways to streamline and consolidate. You can:

1. Look at your telecommunications and technology architecture and inventory your assets. Are there old assets, ACD’s, computers, PBX’s, Voice or Data lines that could be updated?
2. Understand your billing and cost per transaction. Are you being billed correctly? When was the last time you renegotiated your bill?
3. Get a third-party appraisal of your operations, your contact center, and IT infrastructure. This can be done without cost or obligation.

These are the common challenges that our clients face when dealing with contact call center technology.

This was originally written for the GCOM website blog. We help clients consolidate their voice and data networks and develop strategies to communicate, acquire, and implement next generation technology.

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