Navigate the Unknown and Thrive

In this final article of the series, Steve Bell, Vice President EMEA Solutions Consulting, Verint, reveals how a cloud-powered customer engagement and workforce management strategy enables you to innovate faster and pivot at pace to whatever the future may hold.

It’s easier to predict next month’s lottery numbers than it is to forecast what the post-pandemic future will be like. When the dust finally settles on COVID-19, your workplace and customer engagement strategy will look very different.

But in what way? Shifting trends in the pandemic era reflect a clear acceleration of certain forces, a disruptive and disrupted trend in others—and the emergence of totally new drivers of change. The harsh reality is that we simply don’t know what these are yet.

All we do know is that increased volatility in business has become the ‘new normal.’

The best defence in this uncertain climate is to be more flexible: building adaptive processes into your business that enable you to pivot at speed, change faster than the competition, and be more resilient to whatever the future holds.

For most organizations, however, that’s not easy. Decades of technology complexity, overlapping business processes, silos of data, and legacy on-premise applications are barriers to change. Change in one process has a ripple effect on other processes downstream.

To ride the current crisis and thrive into the future, your customer engagement and workforce management strategy needs root and branch reform.

Cloud underpins business agility and nimbleness

The answer lies in the cloud. A cloud-based strategy enables you to innovate faster, avoid upgrade hassles, and unleash new levels of automation, service, and employee engagement. You can easily test and add new functionality, scale quickly in line with demand—all the while keeping data secure.

The bottom line? A cloud-powered strategy ensures you can adapt to whatever your customers and employees need quickly and effectively—so you can maintain customer loyalty and drive revenue growth.

Discard those thoughts about cloud migration being tricky too. A cloud platform built with an API-first approach enables you to maintain your current investments while modernising at a speed that works for you. For example, you can enjoy full ACD neutrality and realise the benefits of improved experiences and lower costs without disrupting your telephony infrastructure.

A cloud operational model is just one way to ride the waves of uncertainty, instead of being overpowered by them. Innovative new technologies can also help your business to drive modern and rewarding customer and employee engagement.

For example, intelligent self-service—from artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and chatbots, to community, web self-service and knowledge management—can help you to automate more interactions and create a better customer experience.

Moreover, modern technologies can automate the entire quality management process, from scoring evaluations to assigning coaching. Innovative solutions can automatically score up to 100 percent of recorded calls, offering much greater insight and consistency than random sampling.

It also enables you to shift resources from scoring and other manual quality management tasks to higher-value activities. Now your team can start analysing calls and focusing on soft skills, coaching and compliance.

Elsewhere, call recordings are a gold mine of rich insights about customer satisfaction and churn, competitive intelligence, service issues, agent performance and campaign effectiveness. Using intelligent speech analytics powered by AI and ML, you can automatically surface intelligence from all your recorded calls, so you can take action quickly.

Let’s not forget the workforce. Emerging, cloud-based workforce management innovations allow you to make the best use of your employees, so they can be more efficient and productive. By providing employees with mobile access to their schedules and alerts, for example, they can better balance their home and work life.

You can alert employees to pick up shifts, overtime and voluntarily give shifts or part of shifts back in real time, enabling them to respond to demand more efficiently.

Now is the time for action. The new normal is upon us. The future will be fast and unpredictable. Talk to Verint to understand how a cloud-powered customer engagement and workforce management strategy can help you innovate faster and face the future with confidence.