Silos Be Gone: Contact Center & UC as One

A strategic communications rethink is underway at leading enterprises, fueled by a commitment to break down the walls that have made conversation between contact center agents and the business during a customer engagement all but impossible. They're largely doing so via digital transformation initiatives that turn their contact centers into hubs for responsive, interactive real-time communications that greatly enhance the experiences of their customers.

Three converging trends provide the substance for these initiatives: increasing enterprise consumption of UC and contact center capabilities as cloud-delivered services, rising use of communications APIs to customize features and functions, and the growing importance of enabling multichannel customer experiences.

As additional evidence, consider these data points gleaned from No Jitter's 2017 cloud communications survey of 205 enterprise IT professionals:

• While roughly 60% said their companies used some cloud communications services in 2017, more than 70% said they anticipate use of such services to increase this year
• Of those not using cloud services in 2017, 22% indicated they'd be adding UC as a service (UCaaS) this year and 16% said they'd be bringing contact center as a service (CCaaS) into their communications mixes in 2018
• 20% of respondents said their organizations have been using communications APIs or communications platform as a service (CPaaS), with another 18% saying they planned to do so in 2018

Clearly, enterprises are finding a cloud model invaluable as they push beyond voice-only call centers and into advanced, highly interactive contact centers.

But what characterizes the modern contact center? The next-generation contact center stands out from its predecessors with support for a number of key features and functionalities. As noted above, for example, leading enterprises are integrating their cloud-based contact center and business communications platforms to facilitate real-time conversations between agents and subject matter experts within the business.

In addition, the modern contact center uses advanced IVRs with workflow integration and self-service options; takes advantage of advanced speech analytics and artificial intelligence for delivery of meaningful insights on the fly; and not only supports voice, chat, email, and SMS channels (at the least) but also enables context to carry forward from one to the next. What's more, leading enterprises are turning to CPaaS-supported programmable communications to further customize their contact center applications and build integrations between these applications and business workflows.

In this Vonage-sponsored No Jitter Industry Insights Report, "Cloud Contact Center: Delivering an All-In-One Customer Experience," discover how the convergence of UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS is helping enterprises across a variety of industries transform the way they treat the customer engagement and deliver superlative experiences. Download now!