Organisations across the world are embracing digital transformation as they provide improved customer experiences. Doing so involves a significant shift away from traditional systems and adoption of a variety of new technical approaches. These include shifting from on-premise hardware to the cloud, greater utilisation of automation tools such as bots and AI, and usage of unified communications and collaboration. These shifts help to ensure consistent, high-quality experiences can be delivered, regardless of the channels customers select.
Digital transformation of this type is a substantial journey that depends upon a clear strategy, sustained investment, efficient execution, and education of agents and the market to embrace new capabilities that enhance service delivery and CX. The transformation is dynamic and complex, and this requires a vision that accommodates trial and failure as well as staged migrations that allow transformations to happen at the organisation’s pace.
The Moment of Truth
“All the things that lead up to a customer today having to get in touch with a person at your company put UC and CX at the moment of truth where the customer’s issue is either solved swiftly or hindered if the two people can’t see or hear each other properly,” says Chris Scimone, a collaboration architect at New Era Technology. “That moment of truth is where things fall apart, so aligning digital transformation with your customer experience is essential.”
Achieving that alignment demands flexibility so organisations can transform in ways that keep their people, budgets, and targets on track. Few companies are willing to invest in a monolithic transformation that aims for a predetermined final state because few can predict the impact of new systems and new innovations. Instead, they are looking for approaches that enable them to try new capabilities while continuing to maximise the value of existing assets, such as on-premise equipment.
What’s needed is a staged approach that enables organisations to trial solutions and scale up their adoption once success is proven and familiarity with the new systems has been achieved. Scimone points out that Cisco, with its Webex Suite, Webex Contact Center and Webex Connect solutions, is offering a modular approach to licensing that effectively allows organisations to blend traditional user licensing, while adopting digital channels and virtual agents in a consumption model.
Grow at Your Own Pace
“What Cisco has done alongside digital transformation is to make it very easy to grow into digital channels and virtual agent solutions without quite the same cost as before,” he adds.
“In the past, there would have been a server stack involved, with high services capex – with Cisco’s approach, it’s more of a switch to turn on new offerings so that makes it much easier from a financial perspective.”
There are also significant benefits in greater flexibility. “If a digital channel or virtual agent experience isn’t getting you the lift you needed, you can ‘turn down’ that service, and re-allocate the spend elsewhere,” explains Scimone. “Cisco has shown you can start small with Webex Connect, solving one use case at a time until our clients are fully transformed with an embedded digital experience.”
New Era comes in to make that transformation journey smoother by delivering typical help desk support, and a wide range of adoption services such as project management, collaboration and customer experience engineering. “Very few customers can ‘big bang’ their entire digital and customer experience transformation – so we want to provide services in a flexible consumption model,” he adds.
New Era can provide adoption services in either an up-front or monthly model, so our customers can pick the services model that works best for them. Scimone finished with one of his favorite customer success stories: “One of our largest customers attached a multi-year adoption services contract to their Cloud deployment. They spent the first year using adoption services to tune their Customer Experience flows and build high priority items on their backlog. In their second year, they are using Adoption Services to further standardise experience and go after emerging market opportunities. Year 3 could be using the services to help attach campaign management, or further extend their virtual agent capabilities.
This flexibility has been wildly successful for them, as it allows them to continually enhance their customer experience, while remaining responsive to market conditions.”
