In today’s rapidly changing customer service landscape, customers are demanding faster, better, more engaging interactions with businesses. This trend is most visible in the contact center, where many interaction technologies converge, like chatbot, transcription, video, and CTI. The ways in which businesses are bringing this all together are different from one enterprise to another, and one single platform can seldom address all the challenges. Instead, businesses need an easier way of bringing together a mix of technologies and systems to best serve the ever-shifting customer experience. This is where the composable contact center comes in.
What is Composability?
Business composability can be a broad topic within the enterprise to cover composable thinking, business architecture, and technologies. Gartner has a great resource to cover this broader topic here.
For the purpose of this article, the focus is on composable technologies.
So…composable technologies is the ability to orchestrate services and components from a variety of sources to act to solve particular use cases. Composability, in this scope, is a measure of how reusable individual components are when combined to address unique problems.
Composable technologies can take the form of APIs, Micro-services, cloud-native SaaS, and can either headless (no user interface) or UI-based.
The benefits of composable technology are:
- Executing a best of breed strategy – No longer are you stuck with a platform that is strong in some areas and weak in others. You can combine technologies that are best for what your business needs to do.
- Phasing Rollouts – There is no need to rip and replace your existing platforms at one time, but instead migrate as your business changes.
- Continuous Innovation – No longer is a business dependent on the roadmap of a single vendor. Through composable architecture, you can innovate at your own pace.
What is a Composable Contact Center?
A composable contact center are organizations that leverage composable technologies to build a customer and agent experience that best matches your use cases, without having to rely on a single platform.
What are the benefits of a composable contact center?
Lead with Customer and Agent Experience – Composable contact centers can focus on delighting customers and agents first, and then determine the best technologies to realize that vision.
Phasing Migrations from Premise to Cloud – By leveraging a composable architecture you can use some or all of digital channel services from various vendors, while still using your premise communication infrastructure for voice. So instead of the traditional re-platforming from premise to cloud, businesses can migrate as their use cases warrant it.
Explore the Art of the Possible – Composable contact centers can more easily explore technologies like call transcription, agent assistants, chatbots, mobile app notifications, caller identification, payment services, etc.
How do you get started on your composable contact center?
To get started, businesses should audit their existing infrastructure, applications, and technologies to see how much contact center composability you’re already implementing. Businesses should reach out to their existing vendors to confirm their composable strategy. Many vendors may promote a composability message but are really monolithic rigid applications. That’s not to say that legacy platforms can’t participate in a composable architecture, it will just require a little more work.
Even some single vendor platforms, like Genesys Cloud, support a composable contact center architecture. Through their Extendable Framework, additional components can be added to the agent’s experience. Just be sure any pre-built contact center UI is flexible and isn’t based on fixed features.
Look for platforms that are built from the ground up with exposed API’s and embrace composability as their strategy. Platforms like DaVinci have been created specifically for composability, bringing services and components from various applications together to delight customers and agents.
Next is to look for areas within your contact center where you can embrace a composable contact center mindset. This gives the organization a chance to define and embrace your own customer experience vision and put the new architecture into practice.
For example, adding AI Automation, in the form of a chatbot, while continuing to use your premise telephony environment, is a strong and common use case for a composable contact center strategy. Chats that require a live agent can be escalated to an agent through a component embedded in the composable contact center UI alongside, the softphone for telephone calls.
Using a composable contact center approach is a great way to get started on your digital transformation journey. Find out more about creating a composable contact center and how DaVinci can drive digital transformation.
