How To Modernize Your Customer Contact Center To Meet Evolving Expectations

Workplaces have undergone rapid evolution in recent years due to varied and complex factors. Customer expectations have evolved, as well. The rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) has delivered more targeted and personalized experiences for internal users and customers alike. And while most of these changes have produced positive results, they’ve also escalated user expectations. Organizations and their IT leaders must anticipate the evolving needs of users who demand immediacy and accuracy. And employees who deliver customer service have a greater burden to meet those expectations.

In the past few years, organizations and their employees have come to expect technology that can go wherever they need to be, whether that’s at home, in the office or a hybrid arrangement. 

Hybrid is very important at this point. In a recent CDW survey, 59% of respondents said their organizations are fully back in the office. But when expressing their long-term preferences, respondents were evenly split between a full return to the office and hybrid flexibility.

Within that larger context, contact centers must flex to be where customers need them to be. And they need them to work, whether the employee has a simpler internet experience at home, or they’re in the office with much faster bandwidth. 

Having agents work from places other than the office introduces a host of issues. Fortunately, vendors have solutions for addressing these issues, no matter where agents are working. When Cisco’s Meraki technology is deployed at an employee’s home, that can help the stability and strength of their overall signal. It also helps us find out where the problem is. The survey found that 47% of respondents cited inconsistent support and troubleshooting as a persistent challenge in creating equitable employee experiences across both digital tools and physical workspaces.

There has also been a huge shift toward cloud-based solutions. Some of that shift is because cloud-based solutions can be more secure than on-premises systems. There’s also just a lot more complexity in keeping on-premises systems secure. The survey found that 52% of respondents are excited about cloud-native collaboration platforms. 

When we’re talking about our cloud contact center solutions, we’re also considering where they’re storing our data, how our data is being kept, how it’s being accessed, how it’s being used and our control as an organization for all of our customers. How can they access and control who has access to data? 

One of the great advancements with AI is that we’re able to have tighter security around some of these things. And customers on a Zoom solution, for example, can select where those files are being maintained and what the retention period is. So, we’re giving that power back to the individual customers rather than leaving it up to the vendor.

Survey results indicated that respondents are using Microsoft, Zoom, Amazon and Cisco, with varying levels of AI solutions within each. We’re seeing much wider adoption of those with innate AI solutions, and considering the employee experience for AI solutions. Most of those solutions include platform enhancements such as automatic transcription and summarization, and those four vendors are currently the big players. 

They started with the employee experience, and now they’re expanding into the customer experience, as well. We’re seeing a slower adoption within the customer experience, but it’s rapidly starting to shift into a fast pickup. What we’ve seen is that the vast majority — about 75% of our respondents — are in the process or have already completed AI implementation within their customer experience workflows. Whether that’s using chatbots, intelligent interactive voice response tools, conversational AI, or whatever the case may be, we’re seeing a much faster adoption of those services right now.

With our consultative approach, CDW is perfectly positioned to assist in adopting these AI solutions. For the past 10 years, I have referred to myself as a translator between technical people and businesspeople. I help one side understand what the other needs, and then I help to make the whole system work. That’s what CDW brings to the table. 

When we are coming into these design and discovery sessions and we're talking with people, we want both the business and the technical people in the room so that we’re all on the same page. And when we’re designing the overall call flows, we are doing that with them in mind. 

While we’re working through the design process, we are talking to the technical folks to ensure they have the right training, skills and tools they need to adopt and administer anything new that we add. Especially when we’re adding in things such as generative AI and conversational AI, we need to make sure they know how to administer them or it’s not going to work out. We absolutely pull the business into those discussions early and often. Everybody’s collaborative and working on the same page. And that has been our model for over 15 years.