It can be a challenge to keep pace with consumer demands for digitalization of business processes and customer contact solutions.

And for many, this pace is not sustainable when they’re using separate and siloed technologies, as described in my blog ‘Frankenstein and IT Solutions: Ready for Omnichannel?’

Creating the right architecture to enable your organization to deliver magnificent customer experiences, engage employees and reduce operating costs must be an ongoing exercise. Just when you finish your project to deliver that one key function or enable that new digital channel, another requirement pops up. It seems never ending.

Many organizations opt to use a combination of technologies and vendors to create a platform that delivers multichannel capabilities. But often, they find that the world has evolved just as the project is completed. The new methods require more changes—or worse—a complete overhaul of the architecture.

Assess Your Future Engagement Platform Needs

When should you re-architect your platform to keep pace with customer demands? Here are seven triggers that signal that it’s time to reconsider your platform choices.

  1. New major requirements surface for the business.
  2. The vendor no longer supports existing components or products.
  3. You’ve decided to change a functional building block in your architecture, such as CRM, contact center routing platform or workforce planning solutions.
  4. New legislation drives a change in your requirements.
  5. Reducing the number of vendors that you work with will increase economies of scale.
  6. Removing antiquated infrastructure components, such as hardware-based contact center platforms (ACD) or intelligent IVR, will reduce costs.
  7. You’ve made a strategic decision to move your business applications to the cloud.

Future-proofing the architecture to enable the business with true omnichannel customer experience capabilities might be on your list of things to achieve for 2018. In fact, it should be high on your list.

Here are eight tips for building an omnichannel customer engagement engine for the future:

  1. Ensure your new solution supports all channels natively so that you don’t experience integration headaches.
  2. Manage each customer interaction in the context of the customer journey to see and understand their behaviors across all channels.
  3. Find a platform that is open and integrates to the leading CRM applications, which enables you to merge sales and support behaviors.
  4. Include workforce optimization capabilities, such as recording, quality management and workforce planning, across all channels to manage people flexibly.
  5. Use analytical tools to continuously improve your operations and gain a deeper understanding of your customer needs. This encompasses both Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee.
  6. Be sure the platform offers an agent desktop application to manage all interactions and view the customer’s full activity in context.
  7. Verify that leading analyst firms have evaluated the solution and ranked the company as a leader.
  8. Confirm that other companies have tested and proven the platform.

To learn more about how the engagement engine of the future leverages contextual enterprise data, orchestrates your customer journeys and delivers personalized omnichannel customer experiences, please register for the upcoming webinar on September 20th, “Architecting the Omnichannel Engagement Engine of the Future,” featuring Bern Elliot, Vice President and Analyst at Gartner.