To ensure and maintain long-term success, companies need to ensure they’re constantly adapting to the needs of their target audience. Unfortunately, this isn’t always easy for modern brands, particularly at a time when customer expectations are evolving at a rapid pace.
An influx of new technologies, changing global environments, and transforming consumer preferences have left business leaders struggling to stay ahead of the competition. Fortunately, there is a solution. Contact centre as a service (CCaaS) offers organisations the end-to-end functionality they need to pivot according to customer requirements. With an always-on, innovative, and flexible CCaaS solution, businesses can achieve the higher level of agility they need to delight their clients.
Nick Parmar, Vice President, Customer Experience at Tata Communications highlights that enterprises today cannot afford to ignore the strategic technological trends that have a huge impact on pioneering customer value, optimising processes and set the stage for innovation and differentiation for the next few years. A Contact Center that thrives on a synchronous CX strategy is imperative for businesses to stay relevant.
Here’s how brands can use the correct CCaaS offering to excel in CX.
1. The Cloud Advantage for a CX-first strategy
To address the ever-changing needs of an evolving audience, today’s business leaders need to leave restrictive, legacy contact centres behind. Embracing CCaaS gives organisations more reliability and scalability to design the CX stack best suited to their specific requirements. According to IDC research, 42% of today’s global enterprises expect to dedicate their worldwide contact center technology spending on cloud-based contact centers.
Companies need a CCaaS offering with a range of deployment and setup options to address all business needs. Brands gain access to global scale and reliability and get the control they need to update and adjust their strategy whenever they choose. This comprehensive control means companies can leverage features like load balancing and two-way traffic scaling to manage sudden changes in demand. With the best CCaaS platforms, companies can customise their contact centre to suit their specific needs, leveraging features as and when needed in a versatile cloud environment.
2. Embrace the Age of Omnichannel
Delighting customers in the modern world means recognising different clients may want to contact businesses using different platforms and methods. While many people still prefer to call a contact centre when they have an issue, others will turn to SMS, video, text, or other mediums.
CCaaS solutions must ensure business leaders can embrace the channels preferred by their audience to allow for quick and convenient conversations. Brands can reach their clients through voice, video, messaging, chat, email, and social media, all in the same place. What’s more, it’s possible to set up AI solutions like chatbots and automated IVR systems to assist clients who prefer to solve their issues with self-service.
With CCaaS you’ll be able to ensure you’re connecting with your customers in the environments they use most without overwhelming your contact center staff.
3. Leverage Innovative Technology for Efficiency
Above all else, customers value speed when they want to connect with a brand. No one wants to be left waiting on hold for hours when they have a problem they need to fix. Fortunately, a CCaaS offering can make it easier to boost efficiency and accelerate time to resolution.
Companies can use chatbots to respond to common customer queries automatically and intelligent assistants to provide agents with the information they need to solve issues faster. Smart routing tools can improve the chances of customers reaching the correct agent straightaway, so there’s less need to transfer calls.
Companies can even integrate the tools they already use to empower their teams into the contact centre environment. Hence, agents spend less time jumping between applications and more time serving clients. This leads to faster results and better customer satisfaction.
4. Use Analytics for Data-Driven Decisions
Adapting to changing customer expectations means being able to identify what your clients need as quickly as possible. Innovative reporting and analytics tools built into the contact centre environment provide businesses with the insights they need to make intelligent decisions for quick ROI.
CCaaS can provide advanced reports on critical metrics like call volume, hold/waiting times, and sales conversions. It also allows businesses to create custom reports for shareholders and stakeholders or design dashboards to help track agent performance.
With end-to-end visibility into the contact centre, companies can quickly see where issues are emerging and solve problems before they mutate. At the same time, they can use natural language processing and AI tools capable of collecting deeper insights into customer sentiment, so you can learn what makes your audience tick.
5. Empower Contact Centre Agents
Customer experience and employee experience go hand-in-hand for any contact centre. To provide customers with direct and seamless interaction, brands must ensure they’re empowering agents to do their best work. CCaaS tools can help with boosting EX.
CCaaS can integrate with Workforce Optimisation tools to provide insights into team performance and boost employee alignment, as well as infrastructure in the back end. It can also work alongside collaboration systems like Microsoft Teams to provide staff with more support on the back end. AI-enabled agent assistance tools can track down information on behalf of staff members, saving them time on research.
Moreover, CCaaS allows users to configure custom agent desktops for each employee, equipped with the tools, dashboards, and insights they need to achieve their specific goals.
6. Prioritise Security and Compliance
Finally, while customer expectations may have changed over the years, one key element remains: all clients want to know their conversations are secure. When dealing with customer data, companies must ensure they take the proper steps to protect information at rest and in transit.
CCaaS platforms come packed with valuable tools to enhance compliance globally. Companies can access monitoring and troubleshooting tools to get to the bottom of potential attacks. There are built-in fraud monitoring solutions powered by AI and systems for analysing dialler identity.
7. The Need for Single Go-To Partner for CX
A robust customer experience/contact center platform is a must-have to a thriving business. However, picking the right strategy may be a challenge for a company that doesn’t specialize in CX. This is where Tata Communications comes in as a trusted partner – to deploy the contact center technology and manage the crucial backbone of network, voice infrastructure and handling telecom regulations across the globe.
Conclusion
Tata Communications partners with customers on both the strategic vision as well as the nuts and bolts of CCaaS implementation. When a customer wanted to uplift their CX strategy in order to serve global clients, the Tata Communications CX team provided professional expert consultancy, design of omnichannel customer interaction, automation and integration, and managed services for support through days 0, 1 and 2. The customer rolled out cloud contact centres in 209 locations, moving more than 8400 contact center agents to CCaaS. They were able to increase customer lifetime loyalty by offering personalized experiences – a true example of addressing and serving the evolving customer.
To learn more about Tata Communications CCaaS, click here.
