Customer service expectations have evolved, the technology of the contact center has transformed too. Today’s companies need an environment where they can manage conversations across multiple platforms and channels without losing context.
At the same time, contact center agents need to be able to deliver amazing customer experiences from anywhere, whether they’re working remotely or operating as part of a hybrid team. To accommodate this new landscape, we need a contact center that’s scalable, efficient, and digital.
The digital contact center is the comprehensive, digitized environment where teams can come together to deliver efficient customer support, drive better client conversations, and even track important metrics into business performance.
How Does a Digital Contact Center Work?
The term “digital contact center” usually refers to a CCaaS or cloud-based CX solution. For a contact center to be truly “digital” it needs to be accessible from any environment. By hosting your contact center on the cloud, you can eliminate the need for complex and costly on-premises hardware, while accessing infinite scalability and access to new features.
Most digital contact centers also connect multiple communication channels in an “omnichannel” environment. This means you can access a huge range of platforms for customer connectivity, without having to use different apps to track discussions in different places. The top digital contact centers can integrate channels like chat, SMS, and social media, with voice and video.
Advanced digital contact centers can build on your company’s existing communication technology. For instance, if you’re already using Microsoft Teams for collaboration and UCaaS, you can work with a digital contact center provider to add omnichannel CX solutions to the Teams platform. A certified Microsoft Teams contact center provider can immediately enhance your existing investment, with smart routing, critical app connections, and a fully customizable environment.
Depending on the kind of contact center you invest in, you can even access disruptive features like artificial intelligence for smart routing and sentiment analysis or API integrations.
What are the Business Benefits of a Digital Contact Center?
A digital contact center is a powerful solution for scalable, revenue-boosting conversations with customers. With functionality in the cloud, you can access all of the features you need to ensure high-quality conversations with your audience and add new capabilities at a pace that suits you.
Even better, digital contact centers are easy to access and implement. Most tools allow companies to provision technology at the click of a button. Some of the biggest benefits of the digital contact center are:
- Easy management: With nothing to manage in-house, you can focus on running your business, rather than keeping your contact center operational. You can set up new numbers in a matter of seconds, and easily scale up or down to suit your business needs.
- Cost savings: The ability to host your contact center on the cloud also leads to significant cost savings. You won’t need to pay for on-premises technology and maintenance. Instead, companies can pay-as-they-go for the tools they need.
- Omnichannel interactions: A digital contact center allows companies to add all the right channels to their system, so they can serve customers anywhere. Because all of your platforms are aligned in the same environment, it’s easy to track conversations too.
- Improved customer journey: Take innovative steps to improve the customer journey with 360-degree insights and easy channel management. You can proactively and intelligently route conversations to the right agent in seconds.
- Insights and analytics: Effectively monitor the performance of your team, track customer journeys, and discover what it takes to strengthen relationships with all of your customers in a simple digital environment
- Efficiency and productivity: Support more efficient teams by ensuring all customer interactions are managed in the same environment. With an all-in-one space for omnichannel discussions and connections to critical apps, your team becomes more productive.
- Quick innovation: Add new features and functionality at the pace that suits you with access to everything from impeccable AI self-service to real-time coaching.
The Top 3 Must-Have Technologies for a Digital Contact Center
While the ideal tools for your digital contact center will depend on your brand and your customers, there are a handful of trends generating excellent results in this space. Here are three of the main technologies you should consider if you’re planning on transitioning to a digital contact center.
- The Microsoft Teams Contact Center
Microsoft Teams has emerged as the go-to solution for digitally transforming companies around the world. Since the pandemic of 2020, Microsoft’s solution for team collaboration has exploded, offering brands an efficient way to keep employees connected wherever they are.
The Microsoft Teams contact center uses support from certified partners to bring the functionality of a digital contact center into the existing Teams environment. This means companies can access things like intelligent routing, omnichannel customer conversations, and a 360-degree view of the customer journey, all within one convenient and familiar application.
The Microsoft Teams contact center allows businesses moving into the digital environment to create a comprehensive all-in-one environment for CCaaS and UCaaS. Since the contact center technology is built into a flexible environment, it allows for the addition of new functionalities and tools to suit user needs, like integrations with Microsoft Dynamics or Power BI reporting.
- Analytics, wallboards, and dashboards
Analytics and insights have always been crucial to running a successful contact center. Now with companies operating from a more flexible, hybrid environment, the demand for data insights is greater than ever.
A comprehensive digital contact center connects multiple avenues for communication in a single application, creating the perfect central space for tracking essential customer data. With the right analytics system, you can keep track of everything from customer satisfaction to team productivity.
While historical analytics give you an insight into the trends and demands of your customers in a changing environment, real-time analytics can connect with dashboards and wallboards to act as a source of motivation and support for teams.
Insights into important metrics in real-time will keep your employees engaged and immediately show supervisors and managers which employee needs support. Combine your analytics solution with management tools like barge-in and whisper functionality to reduce your risk of customer conversations going bad.
- Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has been developing a deeper hold within the Contact Center environment for some time now. As the customer conversation grows more complex, we’re relying more on intelligent tools to help us understand and support our clients. Artificial Intelligence in the digital contact center can take on a variety of forms. It includes the intelligent routing that recognizes customer voices with NLP (natural language processing) and sends them to the right agent.
AI in the digital contact center may also apply to the intelligent insights you can collect from historical data when using a bot to scour for patterns in customer preferences. One of the most common forms of AI in the modern contact center is the use of bots and virtual assistants. Today’s teams are increasingly creating self-service bots to answer customer questions at all times.
Access to bots within the contact center can reduce the strain on the workforce and help companies to deliver a high-quality customer experience. You can also implement machine learning tools, so your self-service offering gets better with time.
Embracing the Digital Contact Center
The digital contact center isn’t just an option for today’s teams but a must-have investment if you want to connect with customers in a changing environment. The customer journey is more complex and multi-faceted than ever. To keep up with changing expectations and demands, companies need to ensure they have the right omnichannel and scalable environments in place.
A digital contact center gives your company the freedom to adapt to the needs of your target audience, with everything from in-depth interaction analytics, to cross-channel conversations.
Is it time for your contact center to go digital?
