How Connect enables digital transformation.

To service today’s customers, your business needs to stay relevant and deliver a consistently efficient and streamlined service. At Connect, our offerings are built around the broader context of digital transformation to help you provide this very service.

Many companies which are struggling — or even folding — are facing failure to evolve and not catering to the changing needs and demands of today’s customers.

But digital transformation enables you to adopt technologies to evolve your business processes, resulting in a more relevant, customer-focused company built for the modern world.

For this reason, digital transformation is a central theme across each of Connect’s offerings: Contact Centre Solutions, Unified Communications (UC) and Network Services.

Where is the UC market headed?

Unified Communications (UC) is a major enabler for digital transformation. UC’s scope has continued to expand and now includes three key areas:

• One-to-one communications: voice, video, and instant messaging e.g. Microsoft Skype for Business.
• Conferencing and collaboration: audio conferencing, web conferencing, and video conferencing e.g. WebEx.
• Team collaboration: shared project workspaces, persistent chat, and document sharing e.g. Slack (mimicked by Microsoft Teams and WebEx Teams).

More than ever, businesses want to deliver these capabilities through all-in-one solutions. However, the majority of UC products don’t yet meet requirements. We recommend using best-of-breed technologies that cover these three main elements.

Cloud UC providers (UCaaS providers) provide call plans allowing employees to make national and international calls. However, these providers only cover a subset of the globe (Microsoft only provides calling plans in 12 countries out of 100+), and are often not competitively priced. Meaning the UC provider believes you’re a captive customer, therefore charging a premium.

Where is the contact centre market headed?

As with UC, digital transformation is a key driver of change in contact centres:

• Increasing efficiencies and streamlining processes for agent activities.
• Providing digital communication channels through which customers can reach the contact centre.

Additional change factors include the ‘customer experience revolution’, driven by the increased inter-connectivity of social media.

In the past, a negative customer experience wasn’t widely publicised. But now, our connected world means customers can broadcast a poor customer experience to a much wider audience instantaneously. Switching providers is easier than ever before, meaning one bad experience can cost you a customer.

Today, contact centres are focused on delivering excellent customer experience, prioritising metrics such as Net Promoter Score and First Contact Resolution.

In addition to these market pressures, technologies are evolving with new capabilities, how they’re delivered, and which technology elements deliver which functionality:

1.  Digital transformation for the agent. By providing an easy to use, intelligent agent desktop environment, agents can provide an improved customer experience. Integrating the CSM/CRM with your contact centre technology, back-end systems, and knowledge base is key to a successful digital transformation.

2.  Digital transformation of channels. Adding email, web chat, and messaging (social media) as communications channels in and out of the contact centre.

3.  The advent of virtual assistants and smart speakers has created new markets surrounding ‘digital voice’ and ‘voice first’. Customers can deploy conversational virtual agents to serve a large percentage of calls automatically eliminating the need to wait in queue.

4.  Context-aware, adaptive self-service. The integration across channels and into back-end systems allows the self-service system (IVR, chatbot, etc.) to anticipate your needs and offer the right options depending on the context of the interaction.

5.  The maturity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), which can now be cost-effectively applied to the contact centre to support both agents and customers.

Cloud Contact Centre providers (CCaaS providers) provide SIP services as part of their offering. However, these providers have two flaws when it comes to SIP provision: firstly, they often only cover a subset of the globe; and secondly, the call plans aren’t competitively priced.

How are these technologies delivered?

In the Cloud, on-premise, and hybrid.

There is also a change in how these technologies are being delivered. Previously, technologies were delivered on-site. But technology is becoming increasingly provided as a service, hosted in the Cloud and delivered across the internet.

While you’ll no longer need to worry about upgrades and patching – this is provided with the service – you’ll be less able to customise the solutions to your business. Similarly, the OpEx model has some advantages, but is typically more expensive in the long run.

As service cloud providers include CRM (SFDC Sales Cloud), CSM (SFDC Service Cloud, ServiceNow), UC (Microsoft Teams), CC (Genesys PureCloud, Five9), these are delivered over the internet.

But for many companies, internet delivery is unreliable and insecure. So there’s now drive to remove the internet from this path completely. Businesses are purchasing these services directly via a secure, private, reliable WAN connection through a ‘Direct Connect’ to the cloud providers’ DC.

As a managed service

Whether delivered on-site or in the Cloud, customers don’t want to manage complex technology themselves. Even for cloud solutions, clients are unable to provide detail in terms of loss or downtime. As a result, they seek managed service providers to monitor cloud platforms and how they’re performing against their contracted service levels.

When clients are using multiple interconnected cloud services (e.g. a CRM integrated to the contact centre), they need a managed service partner to sit above the two providers.

Internationally

Customers need the same technologies, supported in the same way, wherever they operate around the world. Whatever solutions are supplied need to provide consistent service in every geography.

Integrated To other systems

Transforming processes and driving efficiencies can only be realised if the various systems interoperate. As you migrate from one technology to another, it’s important to tightly integrate both legacy and new systems to avoid fragmenting your business and introduce process failures.

As a Journey

Your migration strategy is as important as your destination. If you never reach the destination, or the journey is grueling and slow, the project will fail.

How Connect enables digital transformation

Over the past 30 years, Connect has built a company with the right skills, knowledge, and experience to deliver digital transformation in a way that’s painless and cost-effective.

Here’s a summary of who we are and what we do:

• Delivering simple solutions to complex problems
• Delivering across all three towers required: Contact Centres, UC,  and Network Services
• Unique managed service proposition
• Thought-leaders in next generation UC and contact centre technology
• Multi-vendor capable
• Clever and practical integration skills
• International experience and capability
• Network for Direct Connect and international SIP services

To discover how Connect can take you on a digital transformation journey, get in touch today.