How Digital Transformation Improves Your Contact Center Journey

Digital transformation is changing the way we operate contact centers. New technologies provide unprecedented insight into the way we interact with customers contextually, along with increasing agent productivity.

But the driving force behind contact center digital transformation is the customer. Today’s customers expect to be able to contact a business at any time, from anywhere, and on any platform they want. It’s their customer journey that dictates your contact center strategy.

In order to have this always-connected customer-centric strategy, your contact center must embrace technology to deliver an unmatched customer experience.

Brands need to think about technology through the eyes of their customers to reduce costly inefficiencies, eliminate pain points through the journey, increase the value of interactions, and cultivate customer loyalty and advocacy.

However, contact centers still operating on legacy systems prevent organizations from adopting this strategy and convoluted automation solutions add more inefficiencies. These strategic mistakes lead to higher costs, frustrated agents, and dissatisfied customers.

It is time to invest in a digitally expansive solution and transform your contact center journey.

Here is how digital transformation can help improve your contact center journey.

Automation is a key part of the contact center digital transformation process since it improves employee productivity and reduces costs. However, it’s important to inject automation into the right parts of the contact center customer journey process.

Automation adds value to the customer experience. So, identify the use cases for which AI chatbots, or an IVR platform, makes more sense than speaking to a live agent and vice-versa.

Investing in automation from a customer-centric contact center journey creates a perfect balance between bot work and humans, allowing agents to handle more complex queries. Thereby, increasing your CSAT and NPS scores.

The ideal contact center provides a 360-degree view of the customer. This enables agents to understand customer contact goals, and by doing that, drive discussions that are contextual and relevant without making the customer explain everything upfront. In turn helping agents cross and upsell and improve customer satisfaction.

This is where an omnichannel contact center becomes a true customer hub.

As part of the digital transformation process, it’s important to integrate new channels with other enterprise systems to deliver great digital experiences. Remember to identify the channels your customers prefer and try to engage with them on those. If necessary, you can switch to a new channel, but the transition needs to be seamless.

Also, while providing an omnichannel experience, be aware of the different customer expectations a new channel brings along with it.

For example, during a live chat, the customer expects an immediate response as the conversation is session-based and synchronous. This may not be the same with chat apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat where conversations are asynchronous, and the use cases can range from support and marketing to purchase.

Ultimately the customer-centric approach involves playing to the strength of each channel with a key to give your customer an option of all.

Most organizations have a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to implementing digital changes to their contact center. They dabble in new tools and technology without readying themselves to improve the customer experience, thereby also impacting the ROI.

Instead of bombarding customers with numerous options, a strategic approach helps seamlessly integrate contact options. This helps create value for both customers and agents alike.

Here’s how to do this:

This strategic digital transformation process helps increase efficiency, eliminate unwanted steps, and optimize performance.

Connecting data from data silos and turning them into relevant insights for agents at the right moment is a challenge for any organization with a complex technology stack. Digitally transforming your contact center helps you improve that valuable data which helps you deliver great CX and improve AX .

The right contact center technology helps you uncover what is affecting your customers’ behavior, brand perception, and customer advocacy. And enabling your agent to address a customer goal through one interface rather than numerous tools and plugins – leading to a happy agent.

Knowing this data helps prioritize your CX initiatives along with arming agents with predictive and actionable insights. All this available on a single interface at the agent’s fingertips. And provides a personalized customer experience.

Digital transformation helps unify contact center tools that help stakeholders seamlessly access relevant data regardless of channel or scenario.

Digital transformation changes the way people and processes function within a contact center. It helps create processes that reduce the time agents spend finding information by giving it to them. Therefore, increasing the number of productive customer conversations.

Do check out our guides to on-premise vs cloud contact center and improving contact center customer satisfaction.

You can also learn more about how to digitally transform your contact center with our State of the Contact Center Technology market study.