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.
If you work in IT, you know how important it is to pay attention to digital transformation in the contact center. But are you prepared to support and enable the changes that your organization must make in order to realize the benefits new technology and processes can provide? Here’s how to get started:
- Work with LOB Colleagues to Identify Process Changes and Goals. The only way to ensure your technology investments will meet the needs of the business is to work closely with business users to understand what’s working and what’s not. What complaints are they getting from customers most often? What information do agents wish they had? Where are they least likely to be able to help customers? What changes would they make to improve the customer experience? Only by understanding the needs of the people on the front lines can you successfully transform the business for the better.
- Benchmark your Current Infrastructure. Once you know where you want to go, it’s important to understand where you are. Catalog every piece of technology that’s used to support the customer: infrastructure, networks, hardware, software, endpoints, apps—all should be identified and evaluated. What’s nearing end-of-life and will soon need replacement? How many applications do you have that do the same thing? And, perhaps most important, what tools are agents and other employees using on their own (i.e. without IT support) and why?
- Locate the Technology Gaps. Now that you know what you have and what you need, merge the data to see where to fill in the gaps. Do you currently have the ability to support an omnichannel contact center? If not, what capabilities are missing? Are all the points of contact integrated, so that customers get a seamless experience regardless of channel? What kinds of information are you receiving, and where is it being processed, analyzed and stored? Is the reporting as robust as you’d like?
- Make a Plan for Action. In conjunction with your business counterparts, decide how to prioritize any new initiatives and investments, including the technology you’ll need to buy and the business processes you’ll need to change. Identify the criteria you’ll use to evaluate new technology. Locate the funding you’ll need to implement, including training for IT staff and end users. Create and follow a timeline for deployment—and have a way to measure results.
If you want to enable the opportunities and address the challenges presented by digital transformation in the contact center, we can help. Learn more by downloading our new customer engagement white paper.