What is a Digital Transformation of Contact Centers?
If buzzwords around “digital transformation” hadn’t been flying around your organization prior to 2020, they likely are now. Although the expectations of customers seem to always be increasing, the urgency of organizations to accommodate customers how and where they wanted accelerated with the need to survive during the pandemic.
Customers are expecting a personalized, timely experience that follows them across the channels they interact with your business. For example, they want the self-service inputs to follow them to the voice interactions with agents. To meet these needs, contact centers need to replace isolated communication channels with integrated omni-channel ecosystems that can give agents ands supervisors full insight of each customer’s journey.
A contact center that has all of the channels customers use as touchpoints in the cloud, can get a full 360 view of their customer data that can include feedback, or even AI-powered sentiment from voice calls, email, SMS, chat, IVR and more. A full view of each customer with information like the last contact center representative they spoke with, their last purchase or even the channel they typically use to communicate with your organization gives contact center reps the tools to provide personalized, relevant support.
Introducing digital technologies to your contact center for personalization, call deflection, automation and customer insights will move you to the contact center of the future. The digital transformation is patchworking all of the data, channels and integration points in a seamless way to not only easily interact with customers, but delights them.
A Technology-Centered Transformation
The 80s and 90s brought a wave of contact center process changes as businesses grew their contact centers to handle the growing number of customer interactions. The processes needed to change to meet the demands of customers, and technology was built to support it. The recent transformation of contact center flips this idea on its head: there are new, potentially disruptive technologies available, challenging businesses to redesign their capabilities and processes of their current operations.
Yet, just because you can automate something digitally as you hop on the digital transformation train, doesn’t mean you should. Implementing processes that will make the user experience better, not simply more frustrating for the sake of introducing new technologies is key.
The goals of these new digital technologies are helping drive the emotions customers feel when communicating with the modern contact center from frustrating, difficult or at best, acceptable to delightful, superior and simple.
Key Technologies in the Digital Transformation
Are you thinking you’re ready to hop on this digital transformation train, but wondering what the key technologies are? Among the most popular technologies most contact centers are including in their digital transformations are artificial intelligence for contact centers (AI), like chatbots, IVAs and insightful analysis, fully-integrated cloud contact centers and the move towards orchestrated omni-channel journeys.
