Legacy contact centre providers are becoming redundant

Three out of five Americans would try a new brand or company for a better service experience. This is according to cloud-based contact centre provider Talkdesk, which also highlighted that legacy infrastructure is becoming redundant.

Legacy contact centre providers are struggling

Many of the traditional contact centre providers are struggling to adapt to evolving technology and customer needs. This is due to their legacy infrastructure proving "too expensive to maintain, with huge investments to upgrade."

Instead, innovative and "digital-first" companies are now adopting cloud contact centres. As a result, these enterprises are benefitting from "seamless integration between web and mobile experiences."

Meanwhile, older companies with traditional infrastructure are becoming increasingly redundant. As the report states, these firms can either pay "millions of dollars to upgrade and maintain outdated software" or sacrifice "operational efficiency and customer satisfaction."

The characteristics of a modern contact centre

According to Talkdesk, enterprises should consider six characteristics when evaluating contact centre options. As the report highlights, "a customer’s experience with support can make or break a company’s chance at repeat business."

First of all, the firm insists that intelligent routing should make the customer experience effortless. Today, the majority of customers are "digital first" and prefer to "handle simple issues with self-service technologies."

Companies therefore require a next-generation solution that incorporates the "high emotional element" of urgent or complex calls. Customer-centric metrics such as first call resolution are essential to improving CSAT, decreasing agent effort, and increasing overall efficiency.

Agents should also have an end-to-end view of the customer journey as soon as they pick up the phone. Real-time contextual information such as viewing a timeline of past purchases, service interactions, and recent context about activities online generates business value "from better service, higher retention and improved case handling."

In addition to this, AI-empowered agents can use customer insights to provide better service. An "always-on" AI assistant can enable agents to proactively find answers, determine a customer's intent, and make better routing decisions.

Contact centre agility

Talkdesk also suggests that companies should be able to run all of their contact centres across the globe as one logical system. In the age of globalisation, it is crucial that enterprises reap the benefits of Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) by stitching the public switched telephone network (PSTN) into "one global super telecom network."

Using older vendors often entails "costly, disruptive and infrequent legacy upgrades" in the enterprise. However, modern contact centre platforms are "born in the cloud" and therefore have "cloud-native architectures, microservices, DevOps and agile development practices."

If a company stores digital data on a CRM system, they require a contact centre that allows agents to handle calls through the CRM. In effect, it is absolutely crucial that a contact centre supports a company's digital transformation.

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