Guest Blog Post by Melanie Turek

Melanie is the VP of Research for Enterprise Communications & Collaboration at Frost & Sullivan. Melanie covers a broad range of markets, leveraging long-standing relationships with leading industry participants’ senior executives and customer organizations.

No doubt you’re familiar with the buzz surrounding the idea of Digital Transformation. And it’s not just hype: new digital technology is clearly changing how business gets done—even around the customer experience. Smart companies know that if they don’t focus on improving the customer journey by leveraging advanced, omnichannel capabilities to gather, analyze and act on customer intelligence in real time, they will lose business.

That’s because customer expectations have changed. Today’s buyers expect companies to meet them on their channel of choice, and then deliver a consistent, exceptional experience across all media and platforms. Whether customers prefer using an app or SMS on a mobile device, a traditional website, a community of interest or picking up the phone, they expect a data-driven interaction that gets them the information they need as soon as they need it; and that seamlessly connects and leverages all their previous contacts with the organization.

Frost & Sullivan recommends deploying an omnichannel solution that gives your agents a single view of the customer through an integrated desktop, ensuring your customers have a seamless experience, every time they contact your business. Getting rid of the multiple siloes that define many an organization’s contact center gives agents and their supervisors a consistent view of the customer across all channels and interactions. The result: no more duplication of work, simplified management, higher usage rates and lower costs—as well as a much better experience for both customers and employees.

Our research shows that a cloud-based approach can help companies enable digital transformation quickly and cost-effectively, allowing them to embrace the new way of working. A cloud-based solution will let your agents and managers get up and running on new technology quickly and easily, without a large up-front capital investment. Then, as your needs change and grow, you can layer on additional functionality as soon as your users need it. Support and training are available 24/7, anywhere in the world. Integration with leading CRM platforms comes out of the box, and open APIs ensure you can link to custom apps and build the features you need with your own IT staff, or the services of your provider. Flexible, scalable solutions make it easy to add or remove agents as needed so you can support seasonal variations and corporate growth. And cloud-based offerings may be safer than your own data center; reliable and redundancy are built into the business model.

To learn more about how embracing a digital transformation in your own contact center will speed decision making and help you map the full customer journey across all channels and interactions, join us for the Frost & Sullivan upcoming webinar “The Dangers of Standing Still in the Contact Center: Keeping Pace with Changing Times” on November 16.