Finding the right CX solution in a cluttered, complex market.
Businesses are under immense pressure to deliver exceptional customer experiences (CX), with the contact centre the key to delivering omnichannel engagement capabilities that meet and exceed customer expectations.
By Steven Fricker, Chief Revenue Officer at Connect
Numerous vendors offer CX that deliver some degree of advanced customer engagement capabilities across technology stacks, whether they are customer relationship management (CRM), customer success management (CSM), or contact centre solutions. Business decision-makers are spoilt for choice.
While solutions from market-leading vendors will share certain functionality and offer unique value propositions, not all CX solutions are suited to your specific business challenges and strategic needs.
The unique nature of the challenges each business faces typically renders off-the-shelf vanilla solutions inadequate to effectively address unique operational and CX needs, often requiring bolt-on additions or workarounds to arrive at a solution that addresses these issues.
As such, companies face a complex decision when selecting the right solution to match their specific customer engagement requirements, adequately address their unique business challenges and deliver a return on investment (RoI).
Understanding specific business challenges
The journey to selecting the most relevant CX solution starts with a comprehensive analysis that delivers data-driven insights into the operation.
These insights can help develop a deeper understanding of the business’s unique challenges and identify customer pain points.
By analysing historical customer interaction and operational performance data, contact centre operators can identify trends and patterns that inform suitable interventions that can deliver material and measurable improvements in CX delivery and quality.
Assessing existing capabilities
Before considering new solutions, it is imperative that operators evaluate their existing contact centre capabilities to determine if the operation has the necessary tools and infrastructure in place needed to build a more robust contact centre solution on a solid technology foundation.
Data analytics will help inform the decision-making process by identifying the key features and functionalities that are most important to the business.
By determining the existing capabilities in place, operators gain a better understanding of the specific technologies required to build out the envisaged CX capabilities needed to provide agents with the tools and resources they need to provide excellent customer service without spending on unnecessary features.
Selecting the right solution
With a clear understanding of the business challenges and existing capabilities, operators can begin to explore additional solutions that address every aspect of a business to drive the operation towards sustainable success.
A vendor-independent solution provider will leverage these data-driven insights to recommend the best technology options based on the identified criteria to design, build, and manage a tailored solution that addresses the specific challenges.
Extracting maximum ROI
To extract full value from an investment in contact centre technologies, operators and agents need to understand how to use them effectively.
Realising the full potential of a comprehensive CX solution requires an integrated services-led approach that also touches on the people and processes that bring the technology to life in the business.
Operators require a 360-degree approach that effectively addresses every aspect of an operator’s business environment from end-to-end to realise the unique CX and customer engagement objectives.
This step should include learning and technology proficiency services to accelerate user adoption and entrench usage to shorten the time to value from a customer’s technology investment. Ongoing training services ensure users can take advantage of new updates and added solution functionality.
Defining a roadmap to success
Once the technology, people and process elements in the contact centre modernisation strategy are aligned with the overall business objectives, operators need to test and analyse performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and measure progress over time.
By entrenching continuous monitoring in the operation with proactive managed services, businesses can leverage data analytics to fine-tune and optimise processes, adapt to changes, and improve agent and system performance in real-time to deliver better CX solutions and realise greater RoI.
The optimisation services module draws on data-driven insight and analysis to identify ways to optimise technology and processes, eliminate risks and vulnerabilities, and add value wherever possible through continuous improvements and innovation.
Balancing budgets with customer service excellence
Finding the right balance between technology capex budgets and customer service delivery is essential to maximise value.
Data analytics can help identify operational, system and resource allocation inefficiencies. By streamlining processes, optimising workflows, and leveraging automation solutions, operators can improve operational efficiency, and reduce costs while increasing productivity to ensure there is no impact on customer service delivery.
Leveraging data analytics at every stage in the contact centre modernisation lifecycle, businesses can make more informed decisions to effectively navigate the complex contact centre solutions landscape and find the most appropriate option to meet their specific business needs and objectives.
About‘Connect.
Connect combines global contact centre and customer experience (CX) expertise, deep domain knowledge, and unparalleled industry skills to make the complex, simple. Since 1990, we have leveraged our vendor-independent managed services approach to digitally transform how organisations communicate, both internally and externally. We specialise in combining the most relevant technologies and services from leading vendors and platform providers to create opti-channel engagement solutions, orchestrating frictionless experiences and simplifying complex communication challenges.
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