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Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
Competitive Businesses Deliver Scalable, Omnichannel Customer Engagement
By Raluca Druta, TEC Research Analyst
2Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
Competitive Businesses Deliver Scalable, Omnichannel Customer Engagement
Digital transformation refers to the changes associated with the application of digital
technology in all aspects of human society. —Wikipedia
Digital transformation is one of the most talked about topics in business today, as
companies strive to adapt to new technologies and processes. Digital technologies are
a disruptive force and like any other technology or tool, they constitute a shaping force
in worldviews and behaviors. Over the past decade, a new real-time connected economy
has emerged. Today’s connected, ecommerce anywhere, anytime environment causes
individuals to share knowledge and opinions freely. Online forums, reviews, and rating
services are flooded with customer stories—both positive and negative—which influence
consumer choice in an increasingly connected and competitive global market.
The explosion of diverse communication channels (voice, email, chat, text, social, etc.) has
created customers who are intelligent, knowledgeable, and informed about the products
and services available. Successful companies need to continuously look at improving
the user experience for customers using digital channels. This need extends beyond the
purchase cycle and needs to be fully integrated across all customer engagement—from
researching, to buying, to supporting. Businesses have to communicate with customers
in the places where customers like to hang out and become informed about their next
purchase. As a result, there is a ubiquitous business requirement—regardless of the size
of the company—to manage a multitude of customer communication channels while
delivering holistic customer experiences. Customers have limited time and patience—the
repetitive ‘let’s start from the beginning’ approach will not be excused.
The next generation of customer experience has arrived. Companies have to respond to
this shift in customer expectations by evaluating and amending the operations of contact
centers from different points of view, including channel management, data integration and
management, process management, as well as workforce management. The right contact
center technology is required to consolidate these different but necessary viewpoints in
order to facilitate the design and development of customer-driven business strategies.
3Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
But most businesses today do not have the technological maturity for optimal channel
management. Some businesses have a multi-channel model in place, which supports
more than one channel, with no interaction between the channels. Others have a cross-
channel model, with frequent transitioning from one channel to another. But only a few
organizations have an omnichannel model, which enables seamless communication across
mutually aware—voice, digital, and physical (brick and mortar)—channels.
Quality customer experience through digital channels
Digital transformation has brought about a profound shift in the role of contact centers for
growing companies. Contact centers have traditionally been seen as delivery groups, and
therefore aspects such as service level agreements (SLA), resolution time, or average handle
time have been fundamental concerns for managers in charge of these departments. In
fact, contact centers have had a problem-solving focus and hired agents who were subject
matter experts capable of responding to customer inquiries or complaints.
Sales, marketing, and service departments now have to respond to better-informed
customers. These organizations understand that in order to engage and sell to
knowledgeable consumers, they need to produce targeted expert materials and pitches.
Upon that realization, these teams have come to see the contact center as a knowledge
center that can be used to improve messaging and customer communications. Contact
center agents have firsthand access to customer feedback that they can interpret from an
expert viewpoint.
4Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
Additionally, contact centers are increasingly involved in programs geared toward
enhancing customer retention and loyalty. Indeed, customer service agents are expected
to act as brand advocates increasing customer awareness of new products and services.
Contact center agents are responsible for reassuring and engaging returning customers
and for generating customer referrals. In order to accomplish these goals, agents have
to approach customers in a personalized manner and deliver seamless communication
across channels. In other words, the hit-and-miss approach to up-selling and cross-selling
products is no longer an option. Selling opportunities should be initiated by taking into
account current satisfaction levels, purchase behavior, and preferences.
Monitoring customer experience quality from a contact center engagement perspective
is an essential component of the customer profitability picture. Advanced analytics that
provide insights into customer journeys and engagement complement and intertwine with
the classic SLA or queue time monitoring to form a complete picture of the contact center’s
contribution to customer success.
The multi-channel problem is size agnostic
Although supporting multiple channels may seem a concern for only larger organizations,
in reality it affects organizations of all sizes. Customers do not care whether you are a small
business, a growing company, or a giant. They still want to be able to communicate with
businesses on the channels they prefer.
Let’s take the example of a customer who opened a ticket through a self-service portal and
requested a call back. When this customer receives the call from a customer support agent,
he is not in a quiet enough place to have a phone conversation. He may want to switch
to a chat or text environment to obtain the required information. This type of situation is
commonly faced by most contact centers, regardless of the number of agents or the level
of complexity that characterizes them.
To align with next-generation customer preferences, a contact center agent has to be able
to quickly switch from one channel to another, as requested by the customer. Additionally,
the contact center agent has to have the confidence that he is the right person with the
necessary skill set to assist a particular client. And, with these two conditions fulfilled, a third
condition has to be met: The agent must have access to a comprehensive customer profile
to be able to respond to the customer in a personalized and context-relevant manner.
5Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
From a technology perspective, a contact center that runs into this type of scenario needs
to fully support an omnichannel approach with the ability to support cross-channel
communication switching that can maintain context. The agent should be able to collect
customer data in real time and view historical data from third-party systems such as
customer relationship management (CRM) in a single place. Managers and supervisors
need to have metrics and analytics in place that monitor customer experience and agent
performance on all channels in a single view. This allows the manager to get a clear
picture of employee skill sets and level of proficiency to serve clients’ requests in the most
competent manner. Routing calls to the most appropriately skilled agent to resolve the
customer’s issue becomes a simple task.
Technology traps for midsize contact centers
A company running a midsized contact center that employs 50 to 250 agents typically
grapples with cost concerns and difficulty estimating future software needs. Consequently,
when dealing with the omnichannel conundrum, smaller businesses tend to put out
immediate fires instead of planning for the mid or long term.
In response to receiving large numbers of customer inquiries, midsize companies typically
set up a phone that may or may not be permanently monitored. As an organization begins
to understand that customer engagement can be enhanced through service, it will add one
or two other channels of communication to streamline the communication process—most
probably email and chat.
Technology and support for all these channels will typically not come from the same
vendor, as midsize companies will be tempted to go for cheaper point solutions developed
by specialized suppliers. From an operational perspective, this results in fragmentation
at the level of reporting, routing, and workforce planning. Different individuals or teams
will be assigned to monitor and provide service on different channels, thus breaking up
communication with customers in many short conversations and failing to create a person-
to-person experience and a connected customer journey.
Additionally, this will result in fragmented monitoring of activity across multiple channels.
This in turn will impede gaining a clear picture and prevent drawing assumptions of high
or low performance to help optimize cross-channel communication. It is also important to
note that some agents specialize in a single channel—rather than multiple channels—and
those channel specializations become important factors in organizing contact center work.
This additional fragmentation makes it difficult to achieve optimal workforce planning by
considering all the available skill sets across channels.
Midsize companies may become intimidated by enterprise-class integrated omnichannel
solutions due to the popular misconception that they come with prohibitively high prices.
As a result, midsize businesses are addressing the omnichannel challenge by buying various
software solutions from different vendors and continuously attempting to integrate them.
This not only leads to higher cost of ownership, but also entails enlisting the resources of
the information technology (IT) department.
A contact center solution that is properly designed for midsized companies reduces total
cost of ownership by providing multi-channel communication technology out-of-the-box,
i.e., it is pre-installed, preconfigured, and follows industry best practices. Additionally,
midsize contact center technology enables businesses to start with a few channels that
make more sense from both the financial and customer experience perspectives, and
then add more channels to the mix as customer demand and communication preferences
diversify.
Omnichannel contact centers for midsize businesses with Genesys Business Edition
Genesys Business Edition deploys quickly and shortens your time to value. Jumpstart your
customer experience transformation with preconfigured templates that are based on best
practices and powered by the Genesys Customer Experience Platform. You can select the
capabilities and options that meet your IT budget and business needs, and add digital
channels and options as your contact center and your customer experience evolve.
7Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
“ Thankfully for 29 years our company and its products have gained the trust of our valued clients. Those customers deserve our appreciation along with the latest tools and technology to provide the most professional care. ”
—CEO, Automotive Services Company
Genesys Customer Experience Platform
The business perspective
An omnichannel contact center desktop arms agents with the right information to address
customers with context-sensitive and personalized answers, thanks to its ability to display
customer data collected from multiple data sources in a single view. As a result, agents can
see customer preferences and the stage of the customer’s journey, when an inquiry arrives.
The omnichannel solution was designed to facilitate user transitioning between channels,
allowing for unified customer interactions. An agent can co-browse with a customer while
speaking to them on a call. And because these channels are integrated, the interaction is
seamless, productive, and delivers a better experience.
8Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
When an agent works on email and chat, all the ensuing information is simultaneously
being tracked and factored into SLAs and productivity metrics accurately. Advanced
scripting helps agents make informed decisions based on business rules, rather than
having to pause the conversation to read through the latest policies. Genesys also has the
ability to deliver just-in-time training to agents who need to zero in on specific information
to better assist customers.
As these omnichannel interactions become the new foundation for customer journeys, the
functionality of the contact center needs to allow for managing the unpredictability of
customer behavior in a flexible manner. A customer journey can be as simple as finding an
item of interest on a website or social media, placing an order, and receiving an invoice on
your mobile phone. The customer is satisfied and becomes loyal to the company and its
brands. Or, the customer journey may be complicated and dissatisfying. For example, the
customer may make multiple inquiries about a product via phone, email, and chat, then
place an order and receive a printed invoice by email. Subsequent inquires might follow.
An omnichannel solution gives you the ability to integrate customer engagement
touchpoints. You can further enhance communications and interactions by incorporating
pervasive applications, such as Microsoft Lync or Skype for Business, CRM, and customer
service tools. You can make your contact center easy to use for customers, agents, and
managers, who are familiar with these other solutions.
With Genesys solutions, skill-based routing replaces basic queue-based routing, which
sends waiting customers to the next available agent. Skill-based routing matches skills with
request types and assigns inquiries to the best equipped available agent. This capability is
available in multi-channel and omnichannel environments, thus supporting cross-channel
work planning, which takes into account channel patterns in terms of type of inquiries,
traffic spikes, agent availability, etc.
When a customer calls, we no longer have to worry about the phone not being picked up, or the query going unanswered. Plus, customers can now do things that weren’t possible before, like booking their car in for a service with a single call. Meanwhile, the company is better off because it can track customer contact data and avoid regulatory problems with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. ” —Marketing Manager, Automotive Services Company
“
9Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
Workforce management and analytics is a key addition to the contact center’s core
capabilities for managing employee engagement. This is true for growing companies
that have compliance requirements in regions like Europe, for example. Labor law rules
are factored in at the routing level, so that companies remain compliant. Insights can be
gained into the quality of each agent’s conversations across all channels, as opposed to just
counting the number of inquiries that an agent takes every day. Agent responses may be
analyzed contextually with the aid of speech and text analytics—the emphasis being on a
qualitative, rather than quantitative, assessment.
Furthermore, just-in-time training and coaching sessions can be scheduled to help agents
improve their skill set and problem-solving strategies, and figure out how to address and
resolve difficult customer issues to ensure a satisfied and returning customer.
Thanks to this functionality set, contact center managers can access consolidated views of
the customer journey and employee performance, and define routing rules accordingly.
This enables optimizing resource utilization and ensuring that customers are served by
professionals with the right skills. Due to unified contact center data collection capabilities,
other departments, such as sales and marketing, are empowered with a wealth of data that
can be analyzed to better grasp customer needs.
The valuable information that is garnered from the entire contact center experience can
be used to design better products and services, increase sales opportunities, and develop
targeted and context-appropriate marketing efforts. For instance, repeat feedback about
certain marketing and sales materials not properly describing a certain product collected
by contact center agents will lead to the company amending its marketing and sales
strategies. The end result is improved customer perceptions about a brand or company,
because the customer will know that he or she has been heard.
The IT perspective
The pre-installed and preconfigured editions include standard reports, workflows, and
workforce planning analytics following best practices that fit most midsize contact
centers. This frees up IT resources and reduces IT costs, as IT teams are not required to
handle the time-consuming report creation and workflow configurations required by most
midsize companies. Thanks to Genesys Business Edition, companies can go live quickly,
as most required features and functions have already been set up and do not need ample
modifications. Companies can however alter standard configurations as their needs
increase (and become more complex)—for instance, add more locations or respond to
multi-lingual requests—or as their needs decrease—for instance, most customers resort to
the self-service channel for the most part.
10Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
Session initiation protocol (SIP) integrates public branch exchange (PBX) telephony services
and multi-channel call control, allowing businesses to discard the limited voice-only
capabilities of automatic call distributors (ACD) and replace maintenance-heavy hardware
switches with cheaper-to-administer software switches. Moreover, Genesys provides open
standards–based SIP, which can integrate with existing IT infrastructure—including ACD
if that is what the client opts for—without forcing organizations to adopt proprietary
SIP technology, which may not be integrated with solutions from other vendors. In other
words, the Genesys Customer Experience Platform is indeed an open platform that can
be extended with non-Genesys applications. In fact, Genesys has a close partnership with
Microsoft, enabling contact centers to connect unified communication tools that allow
for business process optimization and increased user adoption of technology through
Microsoft Lync or Skype for Business.
Scalability is an essential feature for midsize companies, which typically go through
fluctuations more often than large enterprises, and which may upscale or downscale their
contact centers relatively often. Growing companies need to expand their contact centers
either by adding more agents or by gradually transitioning to integrated multi-channel or
omnichannel capabilities. With Genesys, a company can start with a single channel and add
more channels, by following omnichannel best practices, to achieve a coherent customer
journey.
Genesys offers the same capabilities regardless of the deployment option—cloud or
on-premises. Companies that would like to leverage their IT expertise or those that are
concerned with data security due to the sensitivity of their data may opt for an on-premises
version. Additionally, these companies have better control over when to roll out and
consume upgrades. Alternately, cloud customers can leverage the power of the cloud and
not have to worry about infrastructure maintenance, data security, and upgrades, especially
when the software solution needs to scale or be expanded with new capabilities.
Rather than buying various software solutions from different vendors and continuously
attempting to integrate them, midsize businesses can address their cost and scalability
concerns with Genesys Business Edition, which allows them to start as small and prescriptive
as they want and scale up or down as their needs change. The end result is a reduction
of the total costs of ownership. Also, Genesys provides IT managers with the benefit of
open standards–based SIP telephony communications and integrated desktop agent
applications, thus allowing integration with legacy systems that may not be replaceable
for the time being.
11Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
Closing remarks
Midsize companies are perhaps some of the most rapidly changing organizations in
the economy, as they seem to be destined for either growth or obscurity. And, digital
disruption has not spared them. Without adapting to the explosion of digital channels,
many of them would share the latter destiny. The midsize contact center has to be able to
evolve to support omnichannel communication, but few contact centers will cut it.
The right omnichannel solution needs to work seamlessly for customers, agents, managers,
and IT teams. It also needs to fully support reporting and routing across all channels, and
include workforce planning and scheduling of agents by factoring in agent skill set as
well as company and legal rules—all to provide the right agent at the right time. Midsize
businesses need the ability to leverage technology that scales as needed, based on contact
center growth and seasonality. All things considered, technology designed for midsize
contact centers should be neither costly in terms of functionality and maintenance nor
difficult to configure and use.
Contact center solutions for the midsized market should provide comprehensive
information and be flexible enough to help midsize businesses manage and adapt to
changes in the market and keep up with customers’ needs.
12Digital Transformation for Midsize Contact Centers
About the Author
Raluca Druta is TEC’s human capital management (HCM) analyst. She
holds a graduate diploma in computer science, and brings in-depth
knowledge of various industries and their related business fields to
TEC’s research. She has experience as a consultant for IT firms in the
areas of conflict management resolution and recruiting and staffing.
She has also implemented feedback management software and trained
end users and administrators in higher education institutions. Druta
is proficient in customer-facing activities and project management,
and has a working familiarity with customer and employee issues
common to the retail, logistics, and fashion industries. Her background
knowledge of website design and SEO further inform her understanding
of critical enterprise software components.
Genesys is the market leader in omnichannel customer experience (CX) and contact
center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. We help brands of all sizes make great
CX great business. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform powers optimal customer
journeys consistently across all touchpoints, channels, and interactions to turn customers
into brand advocates. Genesys is trusted by over 4,700 customers in 120 countries to
orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day.
www.genesys.com/businessedition
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