At our recent global customer event, I asked contact center leaders how they thought enterprise leaders perceived their centers. I was very surprised that many said they’re still viewed as purely cost centers. Even some IT leaders felt that contact center service was a necessary expense. This really concerned me; your contact center can and should be a central part of your customer experience strategy.

Contact centers are where many direct conversations with your customers happen. It’s where the true voice of the customer can be heard — thousands of times a day. And, the contact center is where you can actually deliver on your brand promise. So, it not only brings incredible value in the service you provide, but it also offers an incredible treasure of data and intel that you can use across other areas of the business: product development, marketing, and sales.

There are three simple steps you can take to transform your contact center from a cost center to a brand ambassador center.

Step 1: Understand the whole journey and shape the experience.

Expand your understanding of the customer experience before they reach your center.  Partner with marketing and digital groups within your company to create a holistic picture of customer touchpoints and business outcomes.

As you gain clarity across the journey, it will become apparent where you can optimize self-service, increase sales opportunities and conversion, and make it easy for customers.

Step 2: Pass the word and the context.

In a Global Consumer Pulse Survey from Accenture, nearly 90% of people surveyed said that repeating their issues was a top point of frustration when interacting with companies. And this frustration leads to a lack of brand or company loyalty.

Customers want to do business with companies that make it easy for them. There is a mountain of untapped gold in your business data. Bring leaders across connected functions to examine the underlying data that exists in your customer journey. And then leverage data to provide a seamless conversation for your customers as they move through channels and touchpoints. The more you can do this, the more you reduce customer effort — and that will increase satisfaction and loyalty for your brand.

Step 3: Connect to the right resource, with the right tools.

Now that you understand the journey and collected context, it’s time to leverage all that information to connect each interaction with the right resource — in real time. The best resource might not necessarily be a human. Your data will show that, in some cases, a digital resource connection is not only better for reducing cost, it also can drive increased customer satisfaction.

On the flip side, you should understand cases where the last thing you want to do is have a customer self-serve. In cases of customer retention, revenue generation or increasing wallet share, you want to connect to the best human resource to drive your business outcomes.  And these human resources need the tools at their fingertips to help them understand who the customer is, what journey are they on and where they are in that journey.

Armed with this visibility, along with dynamic knowledge content provided to offer best solutions, your brand ambassadors can move the journey forward with confidence. Create an atmosphere of confidence that comes from your employees as they provide the right answers and trickles down to your customers.

Your customer experience platform must be able to orchestrate any combination of digital and human resources to get the most out of each journey. A brand ambassador center is where revenue generation, customer satisfaction, business efficiency and other key business outcomes are delivered — every day.

Learn more about how Genesys can help you transform your traditional contact center into a brand ambassador center. Read this tip sheet to find 10 ways AI can help you deliver great customer experiences.