The latest in contact
center technology

We’ve shared just how critical a well-tuned IVR system is. After all, your customers consider your inbound contact center to be as much a representative of your organization as your storefront or your salespeople. When it doesn’t deliver, and your customers are relegated to shouting at their phones in frustration. Or even worse, hanging up altogether, they directly connect that negative experience to your brand. 

AI is redefining the customer experience and organizations are investing in implementations that support deeper uses for AI and NLP to enhance customer service and reduce costs. There are three key factors to consider when planning for AI that will impact your contact center; knowing how to leverage your data, how to best understand your customer’s needs, and how to maximize them together to make the most impact.

Consumer and business behaviors have shifted dramatically and will continue to change day-to-day. The good news, and yes- there is good news, is that change creates opportunity. Businesses who invest the time to understand not only what their customers need today but what they will need tomorrow, to communicate with them, and to take a proactive approach to their changing market will achieve greater long-term success. 

The current, global challenges in managing the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many customer care organizations to transition to a remote workforce while, at the same time, experiencing significant increases in call volumes. While these challenges are immense, they do offer a singular opportunity for conversational AI to shine.

When your customers contact you for support, sales or other purposes, what’s their experience like? Do you have a system in place for measuring your customer experience? Tracking contact center metrics is critical to delivering positive, brand-reinforcing customer service with every call. However, many companies lack the proper system to track and measure their data. Are you aware of what IVR capabilities you may be missing out on?

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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