Whether you’re following market reports or know from your own experience, optimizing the customer experience a company delivers has become a top — if not the No. 1 — priority for most CIOs today.
We all know why: Customers have high expectations of the companies with which they do business, and if they don’t like the service they receive, off they go to a competitor. Such fickleness is a defining characteristic of today’s “switching economy,” with experience being so crucial to customers that it quite often trumps cost in importance to them.
Companies that deliver superlative customer experiences consistently across all touchpoints — voice, chat, email, SMS, and so forth — are going to thrive. Those that don’t will be lucky to survive.
No company is immune to the effects of the switching economy, and so we see the migration from rigid on-premises customer-facing systems to highly flexible cloud contact center services continue moving upmarket. The larger the contact center, however, the less the decision becomes about the contact center platform in and of itself, and the more it becomes about the services and support that comes along with it.
To be clear, yes, large enterprises will want to know about a cloud contact center-as-a- service (CCaaS) provider’s current capabilities and what’s on the development timeline. They’ll want to commit to a state-of-the-art platform, one that includes artificial intelligence (AI) components that streamline engagements and assist agents in real-time as they work to resolve customer inquiries. But at the top end of the market, most CCaaS providers are going to have 90% of the same features. The services that a provider wraps around that platform become the differentiator.
As an example, let’s take a look at AI, a considerable change agent for contact center operations today. AI provides the means of delivering insights that contact centers can use to augment the agent-customer interaction and make agents better at serving customers. It can enable personalized interactions, delivering the human experience customers desire.
Understanding how to bring AI into the contact center for improved customer experience begins with understanding what data is on hand. It also requires careful thought on how added intelligence and automation will change internal processes for agents, as well as the interactions between agents and customers. External expertise is often desirable, and a CCaaS provider should be able to provide guidance. Five9, for example, has bolstered its services organizations with the expertise necessary to help enterprises work with their data and fine-tune their machine learning algorithms for benefit across the customer journey.
Services organizations, as they do at Five9, need to be able to help customers transform the agent experience, the customer experience, and the business overall. This requires a high-touch approach that begins during the initial project phase and continues throughout the duration of the deployment. It requires a laser focus on delivering a full end-to-end experience. By applying this sort of customer care, for example, Five9 has taken one customer from an initial 38-seat deployment to one with more than 5,000 agents!
Think of it this way: If your contact center platform provider considers the service it delivers to you to be of the utmost importance, then your business, in turn, can do the same for its customers. And isn’t that what the switching economy is all about?
