The latest in contact
center technology

Remember when working from home sounded like a dream? I bet in your dream it didn’t look anything like what we are faced with today. Sharing your prized workspace with your significant other and with your children (oh listen to that clarinet!) who are now being homeschooled. The abrupt change is a lot to take in much less balance with your desire to continue to be the productive and loyal employee dedicated to helping customers daily.

Organizations around the globe are struggling to manage the rapid influx of customer outreach resulting from COVID-19. While the immediate impact is heavily focused around the healthcare and travel and hospitality industries, businesses across every major vertical are increasingly looking to expand their contact center capacity and convert to a remote workforce to protect their employees and limit business interruptions.

Google’s Dialogflow environment is a great place to build natural-language understanding applications that automate both text-based (chatbot) and voice-based interactions. All of the voice-enabled AI environments in wide use today (Google’s Dialogflow, IBM’s Watson Assistant and Amazon’s Lex are the big 3) enable voice communications by going through a 3-step process, where spoken input is first transcribed to text by a speech-to-text engine (STT), then given to a bot for analysis, and finally then sent through a text-to-speech (TTS) engine to produce audio back to the user.

Empower your callers with an option to receive a call back rather than wait on hold until an agent is free to talk to them.  75% of customers now choose to leave their phone number and receive a return call rather than wait on hold.  The result?  Customers are much happier finishing up their business and the morale of the Contact Center agents is much better since they don’t have to deal with disgruntled consumers.  The quality of the customer experience improves with the Caller Elected Callback solution and saves time, keeps frustration levels down and gives the caller a positive experience. 

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Automating parts of your Contact Center tasks are at the top of the list when considering how to transform your business.  AI fueled self-service options help to improve internal productivity, the customer experience and cost efficiency.

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Offering the best possible customer experience requires more than staffing a contact center and waiting for calls to arrive. Increasingly, customers expect to be contacted proactively with the information they want and need. Businesses are realizing the benefits, both in terms of increased customer loyalty and actual cost savings.

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A primary issue when integrating multiple channels and services in your contact center is creating a seamless, cohesive solution. Today we are able to create and implement an extensive, all-in-one infrastructure built from a number of niche solutions, so that multiple products and channels can be brought into a single design in the cloud.

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Remaining complacent during this time of disruptive change in customer experience is not the best way to sustain your business’s success and vitality.  Out of date back office systems and processes need to be dealt with proactively, responding to the increasingly demanding consumer who expect a fast and easy user experience.Read More

A primary issue when integrating multiple channels and services in your Contact Center is creating a seamless, cohesive solution.  Utilizing the services of expert, advanced IT partners is strongly suggested as they are able to help you create an extensive, all-in-one infrastructure built from any number of niche solutions.

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As a business is envisioning the move of their contact center to the cloud, it makes sense to look beyond the cloud migration itself and consider how supplementary digital applications can be added to improve the customer experience. Evaluating other applications and services that can enhance value to the consumer’s positive interaction will ultimately impact the perception of the company to their customer – and to the  company’s bottom line.  Most likely, your contact center will benefit from a digital transformation.

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User Experience Design (UX) is more than an interface on an application. UX is intended to design and develop clear, efficient, user-friendly interactions between customers and companies through a variety of applications. It is more than just recording prompts for your IVR with someone from the motor pool that has a cool sounding voice or redesigning a call flow so that customers get to the agent they need to talk to even faster.  An effective interaction interface is intuitive.  It is efficient, saving customers time and frustration. And it communicates clearly and is easy to use, making the experience a customer has a positive one.

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When it comes to a cloud migration, it’s important to first define value. Migrating to the cloud takes time and money: the ultimate benefits to the organization’s bottom line must be quantified for the benefits to the company to be obvious.

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Cloud technology is undoubtedly one of the leading enablers of business and IT efficiency. And as with any major shift in process or technology, the migration process can be complex.

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Recent experience has taught me that perceptions of applied AI in the contact center generally fall into two categories. There is the “magic bullet” camp that perceives AI as the glorious solution to all problems that have ever existed, and there are the “healthy skeptics” that believe that AI is too expensive, out of reach, and overly complicated for their environment. Unsurprisingly, there is a bit of truth in each perspective, with reality living somewhere in that grayish middle ground. You may be asking “how do I know if it makes sense for me and my environment?” The good news is that there is a repeatable pattern to help you answer that very question.

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Contact centers of all sizes are challenged from many different angles today.  Customers call in expecting immediate service and engagement for their issues. Contact center agents want support from higher-ups in managing their call queues and getting to critical customer complaints promptly. Incorporating artificial intelligence customer experience solutions can go a long way toward relieving pain points experienced by both groups.

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There is no doubt about it – contact centers must streamline their operations to remain competitive in the modern business landscape. Artificial intelligence is able to contribute to this effort in ways that a strictly human team simply cannot. Many contact centers that are falling behind with the technology are also falling behind in performance. Let’s take a look at some of the ways that artificial intelligence can be used in the modern contact center.

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Imagine discussing an issue with a Contact Center agent and instead of trying to verbally describe what’s happening in excruciating detail, you are able to share screens and easily see the solution together.  Real-time collaboration and content sharing application tools are now available so that agents can work collaboratively with customers over multiple devices to ensure quick resolution of issues.  An added bonus is that more  efficient conversions for both inbound and outbound sales calls are also possible.

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Remember that old saying, the one about things that sound too good to be true? Sadly, the automated strategic planner simply doesn’t exist. With the pace of change and the proliferation of software tools today, it’s no surprise that we tend to look for the “easy” solution to the tough problems. Increasingly, I’ve seen organization after organization chase the next “magic bullet” solution – only to end up with a collection of disjointed tools that almost work together, but not quite as advertised. Sound familiar?

When people hear the term “consultant” in a meeting, some laugh. Some cringe. Some might even roll their eyes. I freely admit I used to be one of those people. Maybe it’s the classic problem: “My boss doesn’t want to hear it from me, but when a consultant says the exact same thing, it’s suddenly a brilliant revelation!” Have you ever had that experience? Funny, me too. I guess that makes it all the more ironic that I find myself leading… a consulting practice. So, you might ask aloud, “Why? I thought you said consulting was dead!” The short answer is: it’s all about perspective.

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Providing a great customer experience through your contact center goes a long way towards building loyalty to your brand. Satisfying this need takes more than ramping up staffing or adding more automated call systems. Integrating an outbound notification solution into your contact center can create a more dynamic user experience for your customers.