Identifying the need to upgrade your contact center is the easy part. Researching and selecting the best provider for your business is much more difficult. From ever-evolving technology, shrinking budgets and increasing demand for better experiences, it’s no wonder the word upgrade strikes fear in the hearts of so many call center managers.

I had the wonderful opportunity to host a webinar with featured speaker, Art Schoeller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, in which we walked through the best ways to evaluate, select and approach leveling up to a (better) cloud contact center.

Customer Obsessed

Art examined the statements he hears from customers as to why contact centers want to move to the cloud. He’s found that one of the best reasons to move to the cloud is to be — or to become — customer obsessed.

To truly become a customer-obsessed organization, you’ll need a cloud contact center that’s up for the job. This type of cloud contact center is:

  • Built in the cloud (not “tweaked” to live there).
  • Multi-tenant: It’s a highly efficient and scalable distributed system that supports more customers (i.e., “tenants”) on fewer nodes.
  • Built using microservices: Individual service units are loosely coupled to make a greater whole.

This foundation provides for rapid innovation of platform enhancements, real-time monitoring and response to feature utilization as well as providing an easy-to-deploy sandbox for testing. Reinforcing this statement, Forrester found that almost 81% of contact centers say cloud solutions provide improved flexibility and 76.3% say it’s helped cut costs.

Buy, Then Build

Of course, going to the cloud is just one part of the upgrade equation. When faced with upgrading to the cloud, many call centers feel that they lose the benefits of building their on-premises software. In reality, moving to the cloud isn’t a buy or build decision. It’s about configuration and extension of the out-of-the-box solution. Let me explain.

The software build-or-buy debate has divided organizations for years. Those in favor of the build side feel they’re unique; their specialized needs can’t be met by a one-size-fits-all vendor-provided solution. On the other side, those supporting the buy side see custom development as a money pit — forever struggling to deliver solutions on time and on budget. The truth is that neither build nor buy — in the traditional sense of the approaches — provides an adequate strategy to meet customer expectations. It’s time to ditch the old build-or-buy mindset.

Cloud-native technologies have changed everything, including the choices and opportunities. While it used to be impractical to pursue both a buy-and-build approach, this is exactly what the new world of API-first cloud solutions can offer. The Genesys Cloud™ platform provides the best of both worlds.

From the buy perspective, Genesys Cloud is a robust all-in-one solution that seamlessly combines the agent user interface, supervisor views and admin setup. It also includes workforce management and unified communications capabilities. The application has everything you need to get up and running quickly.

That said, there will be instances in which the only way to get the secret sauce that lets you differentiate is to build it. Genesys Cloud gives you access to the same APIs used to build core functionality. Leveraging powerful APIs, software development kits and embeddable client frameworks, internal teams can build those customizations that uniquely define your company.

Furthermore, a third option has emerged that allows businesses to easily extend solution capabilities using pre-built applications from online marketplaces. Checkout all of our pre-built apps and integrations in the AppFoundry®. 

Digital, AI and Automation

A Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) system also provides an environment to incorporate and use artificial intelligence (AI) to augment — not replace — agent abilities. Substantiating this point, Forrester Research has found that 90% of contact centers aren’t reducing headcount nor seeing decreases in interaction volumes through 2020. By delegating mundane tasks to automation, such as chatbots, agents can focus and prioritize on the more difficult incoming requests. This provides not only more efficient operations, but also creates an agent who’s challenged and engaged with work.

Genesys vision is to enable any customer to easily leverage AI. It shouldn’t be hard to get started with this technology. Moreover, you shouldn’t have to lose your existing investments because you want to take part in the innovation. ​This is where Genesys AI and Genesys Cloud provide a value unlike any other offerings in the market.

Delivered through the cloud, Genesys AI delivers value in three unique ways.

  1. It gives your customers and employees an AI-powered journey connected across marketing, sales and service as well as digital and voice channels — even simultaneous engagements between communications channels. This holistic customer view improves agent performance through seamless, ideal-match routing with historical and real-time context.
  2. It can handle more tasks successfully by orchestrating the power of Genesys AI and third-party technologies to offer smart virtual assistance and automation. Bot-customer conversations are enriched with knowledge-base articles; real-time tips aid employees during customer engagements.
  3. Genesys AI analyzes outcomes to optimize each interaction and the customer journey as a whole — from proactively engaging prospects likely to buy to personalizing and delivering employee training.

Now is the time for your call center to shine. Don’t fear the upgrade, embrace change and the opportunities that come with it. Your customers and bottom line will thank you.

Remember: Knowledge is powerful. I hope this information has alleviated some fears that inherently come with upgrading a call center. To learn more, watch our on-demand webinar, “Level-up to a better contact center.”