Remember the good old days? When the phone was the only way to interact with the contact centre? You could only queue as many calls as the on-premise ACD server could handle and your agents could work 9am-5pm?
Well wake up, its 2021 and its time to adapt to the new normal. In this article, I’m going to provide an idiots guide to unifying voice and digital interactions and tell you the things we as solution providers wish you knew!
COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the landscape of the contact centre and customer experience. It has made call spikes larger, demand more unstructured and accelerated channel shift. Meaning more emails, more web-chats and more social media.
A common thing I see when visiting customers (albeit virtually these days) and seeing how their advisors work, is a real mess on the advisors desktop. It’s very common to have separate or unintegrated solutions for each channel in a mix of browsers and desktop clients. This is hard to use for advisors, stops supervisors understanding how their teams are spending their time and its more for system admins and IT to manage. The name of the game when it comes to unifying voice and digital interactions is to do as many channels in as few interfaces as possible. Simplifying and streamlining an agents workflow.
Don’t Ask For Everything and the Kitchen Sink
One of the things that make reviewing prospect tenders difficult is when it’s not clear what the customer wants, coupled with the assumption you can have everything and the kitchen sink. Long lists of endless feature requirements are often unhelpful, we need prospects to articulate a wider vision across the technology units that make up their contact centre. Generally, this includes:
- Contact Centre Infrastructure
- Customer Relationship Management
- Workforce Optimisation
- Unified Comms
Where voice and digital interactions are concerned the interaction between the first two is imperative.
These days you can do digital channels in agent desktops of cloud contact centre providers or within enterprise CRM solutions. To this end the first thing you need to ask yourself is "Where do I want to handle my digital interactions?", this will inform the kind of solution you require.
If you have a CRM already you should understand what that CRM can currently do in terms of handling email and web-chat. If it can provide these feature in the way you require you should probably focus on an integrated CCaaS solution but if not you should go with a unified CCaaS solution.
Unified vs Integrated
Within enterprise customer experience two competing models have emerged around how to unify voice and digital channels well. These are the Unified Model and integrated model.
The Unified Model is where all channels are handled by the CCaaS solution and presented to an agent within a unified agent desktop, this is a one-stop-shop for communication. This will often allow various databased or CRM fields to be presented within the vendor agent desktop for contextual information but does not provide a full CRM. This is generally popular for more conservative industries such as the public sector, NHS, utilities and businesses which have not yet adopted enterprise CRM solutions like Salesforce or MS Dynamics.
The other method popular amongst markets with high penetration of enterprise CRM solutions such as financial services, insurance, retail and legal is the integrated CCaaS model.
This is where digital interactions are done natively within the CRM, such as Salesforce chat while the contact centre solution will integrate at the desktop level providing enterprise IVR and self-service options to automate voice calls using data within the CRM and ACD queueing, not just skills-based but increasingly routing repeat contacts back to a familiar agent.
These solutions vary in the depth of integration they can provide with some being able to unify management information with the CRM reporting tool. Furthermore, some can provide more than voice for CRM solutions which don’t offer native digital interaction control or for customers who require more advanced routing.
The key aim remains to do as much as possible, as simply as possible from one integrated screen.