When it comes to looking at big industry trends, it is always important to get beyond the hype and into the details. This is particularly true for those responsible for transitioning/transforming contact centers to be more agile. The reality is that we live in what I have labeled “The Age of Acceleration.”
In this new age, the only constants are that all aspects of the business enviroment are changing rapidly and the pace of change is increasing. This means from frontline real-time interactions to back office business processes to competitive realities, including fickle customers armed with the power of social media and ubiqutious always on/always connected personal devices, everything needs to become more adaptible and much more responsive to volitility from wherever and however it may arise.
One of the trends of the past few years that has been important to watch is the move by a growing number of enteprises of their contact centers to the cloud. While many of the benefits of such moves are well-documented, especially regarding moving CapEx to OpEx, the agility to be faster to market, faster in the market and more responsive to customers all while being more cost-efficient, has emerged as a major market driver.
In fact, from just a few years ago when moving the contact center to the cloud was almost purely a matter of cost savings agility for maximizing the value of interactions is now a priority. Knowing and using things like omnichannel interactions, richer context-based sessions, big data analytics, integrations with CRM and other systems to have a deeper view of the entire customer journey and a host of other new tools, have made contact center hubs for meeting C-level demands to improve everything about the customer experience.
It also used to be that the low-hanging opportunity for moving contact centers to the cloud was aimed mostly at small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). However, increasing larger and larger enterprises as seeing the value of moving their contact centers to the cloud, as agility along with cost containment become the prime focuses have caused them to rethink the capabilities they wish to have for interacting with customers and for continuously monitoring and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the business processes that go into tracking the customer journey that engender customer loyalty and brand enthusiasm.
A great place to get beyond the hype and into the realities of how even really large enteprises are benefitting from moving their contact centers to the cloud is the webinar, How Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud Increases Business Agility. To be held, Tuesday, July 28, 11:30 AM EDT, guest presenter Drew Kraus, research vice president at Gartner will join Tim Passios, vice president, solutions marketing for Interactive Intelligence, to delve into the details on how moving contact centers to the cloud has helped leading companies increase business agility and transform its customers’ experience.
In fact, use cases will be featured including how one of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies, Phillips, accelerated new deployments with minimal capital cost, while also providing a consistent experience to over three billion customers in 100 different countries.
Whether you are an SMB or responsible for the customer interaction of a large multi-national, as noted above adapting correctly, and it should be added with some sense of urgency, to change and its increasing speed is one constant that will have profound impact on the future success of your organization. The proof is in the details of what leading-edge enterprises are already seeing as they move their contact center capabilities to the cloud.