Is It Time For Digital Transformation?

1. Agent Productivity Concerns

Technological advancement is imperative to enabling personalized assistance for every customer. Your agents need access to data collected before, during, and after every customer interaction, as well as aggregation of that data across channels, journey flows, systems, and the organization.

If your agents don’t have a 360° picture of every customer exchange, you’re in trouble.

Customer expectations are continually changing. More and more, customers expect consistent interactions in an instant, regardless of the channel they choose to engage with. Research from McKinsey & Company shows that on average, customers engage with three to five channels during each journey they take toward making a purchase or resolving an issue.

Omnichannel has surpassed buzzword status. Too often, customers receive a disjointed experience because agents don’t have access to all the touchpoints required to fully understand cross-channel customer journeys.

If this scenario is familiar, it’s time to innovate and modernize.

2. Failure to Meet Customer Expectations

The truth is, customers usually dread dealing with a contact center, so if your organization doesn’t have self-service tools in place, you’re falling behind.

Roughly 66 percent of customers start a journey with a self-service channel before reaching out to an agent.

Increasingly, customers expect contact centers to work resolutely behind the scenes, preventing issues before they happen, knowing when, where, and how to step into an interaction; and proactively reaching out when it makes sense. Putting such CX functions into place requires absolute mastery of customer needs and organizational enablers to expedite data collection, analysis, and sharing. On top of all that, customers expect your contact center to equip them with the right tools to resolve similar issues from happening in the future.

Building a truly customer-focused contact center requires not just one system, but a cohesive ecosystem of capabilities. It requires bringing the end-to-end customer journey together with multiple customer relationship management systems that enable uninterrupted data curation.

Regardless of where your contact center sits on the scale of digitization, ongoing technology adoption and data integration initiatives are imperative for meeting the expectations of your customers.

3. IT Inefficiencies

Ask yourself these questions:

How easy would it be to expand your current contact center solution?
Could you implement an emerging technology or new channel with ease?
Could it be adopted cross-departmentally without a hitch?

If the answer is no, it’s time to rethink your platform strategy.

You can always be more streamlined, but major IT inefficiencies can undermine your entire organization and need to be a top priority for strategic growth. Solutions built for specific areas of an organization lack omnichannel consistency and end-to-end logic and can leave critical data trapped in silos.

Data and information silos can cause digital transformation initiatives to drag on for years, but contact centers need to work from analytics-based insights much faster than that. Without the right tools to connect all omnichannel interactions, journeys, and key data points, it’s next to impossible to leverage emerging technologies to drive business value.

4. Management Effectiveness

Beyond your agents and customers, your management team also needs to be better equipped to make data-driven decisions.

Do you know what customer pain points drive the most inquiries? Which customer issues result in the most touchpoint interactions before reaching an agent? Do you know how long it takes your agents to resolve those issues?

If your organization struggles with a lack of consistent reporting, data silos, and a poor view of performance metrics, you’re at a difficult vantage point to translate analytical insights into action to make a transformative impact.

The less your management team knows about operational effectiveness, the more your customers’ experience suffers.

Final Thoughts?

The way contact centers operate will continue to evolve, making it essential for organizations to outfit themselves with platforms and technologies necessary to properly extend their capabilities. Digital transformation can address each of the pain points noted above while aligning contact centers with current customer demands – and ensuring they can continue meeting changing demands.

Upstream Works provides enhanced omnichannel contact center solutions to support digital transformation, CX innovation, and operational efficiency. The unified agent desktop, digital channel flexibility, seamless integrations, and simplified management enables personalized CX, improved productivity, and increased agility. Upstream Works has over 15 years of omnichannel expertise and is trusted around the world. Learn more here.