Times are changing for contact centers, and the disruption to how we work can be stressful. It’s especially true when trying to choose a path forward amidst rapidly changing technology and customer expectations. For example, Forbes calls out a Gartner prediction that, by 2022, 72% of customer interactions will involve an emerging technology such as machine-learning applications, chatbots or mobile messaging.

Customer experience technologies are converging and, as they do, they’re producing huge amounts of data that can be used in new ways to personalize customer experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now available to use this data — including digital and voice – to open up new opportunities to streamline and optimize customer journeys. But, to get predictive and personalized with customer data, AI needs to learn from it — customer by customer. And that requires a new, holistic way of thinking.

Four Pillars of Customer Service

As technologies converge, so does customer service. This broader approach to customer service requires a fresh look at its four pillars and how they support long-term needs.

  • Getting connected – An omnichannel foundation is the start of creating a seamless view of customer journeys, including support for intelligent self-service.
  • Process orchestration – Connect technology to orchestrate increasingly complex and personalized customer engagement — across marketing, sales and traditional service.
  • Managing resources – Employee engagement improves productivity and morale. Empower agents with full access to customer data and resolve more problems faster.
  • Knowledge and insights – Collect and manage insights from all customer touchpoints to understand your next-best action and make better decisions.

One Decision Crosses All Areas of Customer Service

While these pillars were once the sole domain of different parts of an organization, that changes when all customer touchpoints connect. Four pillars no longer mean four distinct decisions about service. These pillars are tightly interwoven — even more so when using the power of AI.

In fact, AI continues to get smarter with consolidated data. Customer service, like the customer journey itself, is less and less boxed-in by departmental walls. And it makes sense because customers see your business as one entity. They may connect via chat one day and talk to a different department on the phone the next day. But their expectation is that every interaction with you includes a single, real-time understanding of their history and preferences.

SaaS Changes the Game

Software as a Service (SaaS) grew from the frustration of dealing with the heavy burden of managing hardware, uptime and security demands of the business. Managing upgrades to benefit from rapidly changing technology like AI is too time- and resource-intensive to keep up-to-date. And it becomes too difficult to take advantage of a full application ecosystem that spans the four pillars of customer service.

Cloud enables speed of innovation, scalability and flexibility in computing power to be useful for each unique customer experience. If you want the benefits of AI, it only makes sense to run AI in the cloud.

Genesys Cloud was built for easy consumption and continuous deployment to ensure elasticity, scalability and efficiency. It provides you with customer experience innovation at your fingertips across all four pillars of customer service. It provides the best and broadest customer and employee experience capabilities in pre-packaged use cases based on 30 years of experience. And it lets you power more connected, meaningful experiences on a modern SaaS architecture that you can trust for security, stability and scale.

Leverage Your Full Ecosystem

The cloud also makes it a lot easier to extend the capabilities of your ecosystem. One way we support this is through partner integrations in the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.

AppFoundry features 290 applications — and that number is growing. It makes it simple to get more value from your investments in Genesys solutions. Customer experience innovations at your fingertips are extended with click-to-install innovations and free trials of new applications that already run on Genesys Cloud.

Time to Change

The customer experience doesn’t start or end only in the contact center anymore; it’s an end-to-end journey that spans four pillars of customer service. For some, the “new” contact center might feel unsettling, unknown and downright scary. But the opportunities that cloud enables are boundless. As times change, so must we. As Albert Einstein advised, “If you always do what you always did… you will always get what you always got.”

For more details on the Gartner perspective, download “The Future of the Contact Center.”