Why Isn’t Your Contact Centre in the Cloud Yet?

When the pandemic hit the world, organizations worldwide had to fast track their digital efforts. With limited in-person interactions due to lockdowns, customers were swift to move towards digital and self-service channels. Soon, it became apparent that the reason to call a contact center was to seek human assistance. 

The top complaint in the last few months from customers has been long wait times to speak to a live agent. People want support and need to talk to real humans - especially in a crisis situation. The Contact Centres today are operating at near or over capacity with legacy tools resulting in pain points across functions. Here are top challenges the various Contact Centres across all industries are facing during the pandemic.

1. Longer wait times resulting in customer irritation. Customers lack clarity on which interaction channel to use for support.
2. Significant increase in call volume resulting in strained staffing.
3. Inability to scale agents or get employees to work from home.
4. Traditional self-service technology capabilities such as IVR are not effective.
5. Overall, poor customer and employee experiences caused by lack of fully digitized services and non personalized experiences across service delivery channels.

The situation has clearly shown that existing service models are outdated and unfit for purpose as they rely on traditional legacy contact centre systems that do not integrate with remote ways of working. As customer expectations and behaviors change, so must the tools that serve those customers. 

A Modern Contact Centre

Business Leaders are evaluating their future state plans for a post pandemic world. We believe that there are five focus areas that every organization must consider to modernize their contact centre. 

1. Concentrate on the core human element as the organization shifts to a digital mindset.
2. Strengthen the technology foundations.
3. Build on data and innovate.
4. Enable workforce and prepare them for the future.
5. Streamline the channel strategy (multi-experience).

The focus has to be on developing a “Customer Engagement Hub” that provides customer service through a multi-channel service offering with human support in high-value moments.

Evaluating a Cloud Based Platform

As Contact Centres become more virtual and remote, organizations will need to start re-evaluating their traditional operating models. They will need to rethink existing business processes across traditional contact center functions such as Quality Monitoring, Coaching, and Knowledge Management.

From a technology perspective, organizations will be driven to move to a cloud-based, data-driven technology platform. AI enabled solutions supporting asynchronous communication channels (such as Chat, Social Media), sentiment and conversation analytics will become the norm. There will be a greater need to integrate with other core contact center systems, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Telephony, Workforce Management (WFM), Quality Monitoring (QM) and Knowledge Management (KM) tools. The platforms will need to be architected around open programming concepts opening doors to innovation (and communities). 

A Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) allows organizations to leverage managed services across major aspects of the Contact Centre. CCaaS offers scalability, flexibility and agility, all while simplifying operations. We expect CCaaS to be prominent in all organizations as it is easier than a comparative on-premise implementation. With a CCaS solution, the key components of managing on-prem implementations and solutions are mitigated, such as support and maintenance, the inability to make quick updates, the need for specialized skills and rapid outdated or technical debt. The key components of CCaaS out-of-box cloud based platform include:

1. Omnichannel customer experience 
2. Interactive voice response 
3. Automatic call distribution
4. Computer telephony integration
5. Email, text, chat, social media
6. Quality management
7. Analytics and reporting

Late last year, Gartner released the inaugural 2020 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service.

The CCaaS market is one to watch out for in the coming years and here are some of our observations:

• Assessing the best fit solution is purely based on organizations current state needs and target state aspirations.
• The leading platforms are Genesys and Nice-In-Contact, but there are other aggressive competitors (such as AWS, TalkDesk) that are not so far off.
• Majority of the key players have Open APIs and integrations with leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) players, AI/NLP services, which in some cases puts them ahead of leading platforms.
• Critical capabilities that differentiate the vendors are Process orchestration, Resource Management, Knowledge and Intelligent insights.
• Legacy Contact Centre solution providers such as Aspect, Avaya, Cisco are not in the list - there is a view that they are not innovating as fast enough as its competition and are left behind.

Getting started on the journey

Your Contact Centre of the future should look different for a post pandemic world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled, agents working remotely, increased gamification to drive agent productivity, and more personalization to customers is what we expect. Organizations will need to start exploring a cloud platform to enable accelerated Contact Centre migration off legacy telephony infrastructure.

We encourage you to start performing your options analysis, building the business case to explore the shift to cloud, conducting a pilot and thinking about your new operating model. In a digital world, customer service will have a different definition. Your Contact Centre will become an even more critical aspect of your business and be the competitive advantage that you are looking for.

This article is co-authored by Ravin Kumar Srinivasan and Biswajit Das. We'd love to hear your views on this topic.