Don’t Overcomplicate Your Contact Center Technology

Early in my career, I managed contact center technology for a small engineering contact center. One day, a member of the management team strolled past my desk and exclaimed, “We have a new group of agents in Oregon that we need to get onto our system. Let’s put together a plan to make that happen.” It’s interesting that, in the tech space, a single sentence can immediately trigger a complex workflow, a litany of steps and perhaps most importantly, the need for more coffee.

That simple ask required changes in a myriad of systems, not to mention the additional user and admin training for the new group. To summarize, this simple ask required the following:

• Updates to the CT ADE IVR system
• Updated “vector” programming in the PBX
• New agents, queues and skills configured in the contact center solution
• Manual updates to the workforce management spreadsheet
• Access to customer support tools to log into remote machines
• Updated DN programming in the PBX
• Updated routing strategies in the contact center solution
• Configure new PBX and CC reports
• New integration to the incident management system and report configuration
• Modifications to the custom screen-pop application
• Update the custom survey process to capture Voice of the Customer
• Repointing alerts to an email system so the new group delivers them – this included updating the custom middleware solution to prioritize the alerts
• Thick client software updates on all client systems to enable the latest desktop

Change management and onboarding are hefty tasks in and of themselves. They can remain so even when automation is put to good use. It’s already a significant lift to realign process and training with a new group of people. When you add a requirement to update over a dozen disparate systems, a simple request can spiral into a multi-month project that is costly to execute.

It’s easy to find yourself in this position too. You buy an IVR because you need one. You purchase a PBX because you need one, and that system might have the most features available. And the story grows more complex when you add in workforce engagement management, digital, artificial intelligence, and other capabilities you may need now or in the future. Years later you find yourself with a tangled web of dozens of systems, complex integrations and an onboarding process that requires a custom-made handbook. In the end, IT leadership finds it hard to take the company’s CX architecture into the future and almost impossible to balance keeping the lights on and meeting the needs of the business.

All-in-one composable cloud contact center solutions unify multiple customer experience capabilities into a single, well-oiled and easily deployed machine. All are built on the same platform and are designed to work together. IT’s focus can then shift to creating differentiation through high impact projects. The business adapts more easily to the changing needs of customers and employees to achieve better results such as:

• 40% to 87% decreases in onboarding times
• 20% boosts in agent productivity
• Improved Net Promoter Scores

An all-in-one solution allows you to reduce complexity within your technology stack. Not only does it reduce the number of complex integrations in your environment, but it also centralizes data for optimal reporting and customer insights. And with a cloud based all-in-one solution, you can alleviate the heavy lifting that’s required to maintain and manage upgrades, resiliency systems, unexpected scale in demand, or even something as simple as updating the IVR.

Learn from my experiences. Don’t waste any more time maintaining complex integrations, submitting multiple change notifications or maintaining dot upgrades to software and hardware. Migrate to an all-in-one cloud platform and start architecting customer and employee experiences for swift, sustainable differentiation. Get the agility and resilience you need and equip every layer of the business to drive better outcomes – no matter what comes your way.

Luke Sturek

Luke Sturek is a Customer Experience Expert, working primarily with enterprise customers in the technology vertical. Luke has championed CX for 16 years, including managing CX technology stacks directly and...