It's safe to say that the contact centre experience is growing increasingly diverse for many businesses. Today, companies of all shapes and sizes are looking for new ways to embrace new technologies, cloud-based systems, and advanced methods of working with one goal in mind: better customer experience.
West Corp are specialists in the world of customer experience, with a unique approach to making UC and collaboration simpler for every business. From solutions that connect workers around the globe, to systems that help to make contact centres more productive in-office, West puts connectivity at the heart of everything they do. The result has been six years in the leaderboard for Gartner's UCaaS Magic Quadrant.
I had the opportunity to connect with Ron Lambert, the Contact Centre Strategy Director for West’s Unified Communications Services. He's responsible for handling all of the West CC services that are sold to customers as a service. In other words, he inspires West's CCaaS offering.
What Technology Trends are Driving the Transformation of the Contact Centre?
With over 20 years in the industry, and 7 years focusing on the cloud contact centre, Lambert has seen his fair share of transformation. I was eager to find out which of the leading disruptive technologies like CCaaS, AI, and omnichannel West believes is driving a new vision of the contact centre space.
The first thing Ron mentioned was the continued move from the legacy portfolio to the cloud.
"Today's consumers expect to be dealt with in a way that's seamless and intuitive. That requires many companies to start thinking more carefully about how they can unify their services in the cloud. With cloud services, today's organisations have more freedom to manage things like changing functionality, evolving regulatory and security compliance, and more."
Lambert also told me that West has seen a more significant drive towards omnichannel solutions for many customers. "Omnichannel used to be the exception, but now many larger companies are thinking about the needs of the modern customers more carefully. They know their clients don't want to move from one channel to another and have to repeat their issues. Saying that, there's still plenty of clients out there that are yet to embrace the multi-channel."
Ron went onto discuss the trending issues of privacy and security, especially with the deadline for GDPR being imminent - two aspects which continue to be a crucial consideration for the CIO. "For West, this is an opportunity to step up and partner with our customers. As their service provider, we have a degree of responsibility, but they do as well. When we work closely together, we have a better chance of succeeding with security and compliance."
What CX Wins are Organisations Getting by Moving to CCaaS?
Though there are many trends shaping the contact centre today, one of the biggest focal points for any company has to be on customer experience. As Ron noted, "Customer experience is the new competitive battleground" for today's brands. It's the number one differentiator for anyone with a service or product to offer. If you're not giving your clients the experience that they expect, then they're more than happy to go looking for it elsewhere.
Lambert told me that West have a broad mixture of customers coming to them for help with customer experience as a service.
