Contact center transformation is at the top of the agenda for many businesses.
Why? Chiefly because legacy vendors are making their aim to move customers to the cloud much more explicit.
Yet, there are many more reasons. The strategic importance of customer experience, the new possibilities AI brings to the contact center, and the increasing maturity of CCaaS solutions are excellent examples.
Unfortunately, contact center transformation projects are often steeped in complexity.
Consider large enterprises. Many have installed a plethora of tools over the years, creating a complex patchwork quilt of systems tightly sown together.
Every tweak may alter a business process, agent workflow, or reporting preset.
As such, frustrations are aplenty during contact center transformations, with the following five being some of the most pressing.
1. Bolt-On Channels Have Siloed Data
In recent years, consumers have begun using more channels to interact with sales and service teams. As a result, businesses have had to find new ways of introducing different platforms into their contact center environment.
Unfortunately, bolt-on strategies, which involve stitching additional functionality onto an existing ecosystem without intelligent integrations or APIs, can cause problems.
Simply purchasing a "WhatsApp" option for customer service doesn't mean it will integrate seamlessly with the rest of an existing contact center.
As such, companies end up with siloed data and a fragmented view of the customer journey distributed across different ecosystems.
What You Can Learn
When a manager hits an integration barrier, they must consider: why does it happen? By doing so, they will likely learn lots!
Take these learnings into all future tech projects, and over time the team build a more agile customer service environment.
2. Superficial Systems Drive a Need for Custom Development
Like bolt-on channels, many contact center solutions - including older CRM, WFO, and helpdesk systems - are relatively superficial.
Sure, they provide companies with many settings to explore, but issues arise when the business needs to make them work with other contact center tools.
Unfortunately, this leads to greater expense and complexity in the long run. Moreover, as skilled developers become increasingly hard to find, many brands either hit a wall in their transformation efforts or pay through the roof for customer development.
What You Can Learn
Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder of babelforce, suggests: "Managers and IT teams must not only think about how to add a new system into the contact center environment but also consider: how are we going to change it later?"
“If elements of that change require code, the shortage of developers and IT may come back to sting the contact center down the road.”
For this reason, brands often turn to no-/low-code development, allowing them to respond and accelerate future transformation projects.
3. Few People Understand Mission-Critical Processes
There are countless crucial processes involved in managing any contact center. However, in many environments, only a handful of professionals know the ins and outs of essential processes within the company's operation.
“It’s not uncommon that I will talk to an organization, and they need to get seven or eight people together to understand a process,” says Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder of babelforce.
“Significant elements of what we discuss are completely unclear unless we get John on the phone. But he might be away, and when we do get through to him, he says something completely different to everyone else. That is a very familiar situation during transformation initiatives.”
Yet, it's incredibly challenging to make a new initiative work without a collective understanding of the behind-the-scenes processes that support contact center experiences.
More alarmingly, leaders risk investing in the wrong transformation tools.
What You Can Learn