CCaaS 2023: The Open CCaaS Imperative
Contact centers have gone digital. Technology has evolved. And since the problem has changed, the solution also needs to change.
The problem has changed. The solution needs to change too.
Organizations are in a tough place. They need to accommodate the shift to digital engagement, but they don’t have unlimited resources. These companies want to elevate customer experience without additional labor cost — and in the contact center this is particularly challenging.
As it turns out, traditional telephony-based CCaaS solutions have a difficult time addressing these changes. Here’s what Gartner had to say about the majority of CCaaS vendors:
“The market has seen a notable increase in demand for systems that can support greater levels of sophistication in support of digital channels, self-service, interaction and journey analytics – and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide enhanced levels of automation. However, CCaaS vendors’ support for these capabilities often lacks the functional maturity to meet customers’ demands” – Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, Aug 2022
With Open CCaaS, there is a better way.
Ventana Research: Modern Customers Need Modern CX ProcessesWhat is Open CCaaS?
The concept of CCaaS is promising – a single application to consistently and efficiently manage all of your contact center conversations. But in reality, these applications lacked the openness and flexibility required to truly help you succeed. Different regions or business units may use different vendors for voice or digital channels, emerging social and messaging channels may not be supported at all.
Open CCaaS was built to solve today’s challenges, with a new set of capabilities including:
- Open Ecosystem
- Open AI
- Best of Breed Applications
- Open Engagement Data Hub
- Enterprise-wide CX
What does it mean to be Open?
Traditional CCaaS platforms are known for being closed-off, making integration difficult or impossible. With a closed ecosystem, a CCaaS provider cannot provide the innovation and openness required for an organization to scale experiences effectively. This requires a data-led approach to AI and automation. If you are stuck using your telephony provider for your digital channels, or your CRM for your knowledge, you are left with a closed set of data, unable to utilize and access all customer interactions to improve CX across the enterprise.
This openness ensures business application continuity regardless of communication infrastructure choice, regardless of existing vendors, and provides opportunity for our partners to utilize our best of breed applications to create their own differentiation.
Contact center solutions don’t exist in a vacuum. Every organization has a wide variety of existing applications that contribute to your customer experience. An open platform can utilize 3rd party CRM and HCM as data sources to augment and personalize user experiences. Further, APIs and other connectors can offer limitless extensibility and innovation opportunities.
Today's Contact Center is not driven by telephony
Traditional CCaaS solutions were built around the voice channel. These companies started with an ACD solution and added additional channels over time as these channels gained popularity.
While the phone will always be an important channel for your customers, digital channels are now just as critical. Since consumer behavior has fundamentally changed, telephony should no longer be the primary driver of a contact center’s purchase decisions. Great CX at a lower cost must be at the center of this decision. Previously it may have been enough to select an ACD and then supplement it with point solutions. A better option is to select an open platform with best-of-breed CX solutions, omnichannel routing and UI, and bring-your-own-telephony capabilities.
Four Challenges of Taking a Telephony-First Approach to CCaaSThis is a carousel with slides that do not auto-rotate. Use the Next and Previous buttons to navigate.
“Instead of starting with telephony and interaction routing, many organizations have adopted a more flexible, “bring your own telephony” approach more aligned with advanced cloud communication offerings. When the core routing system is de-emphasized, an organization is freer to weigh the merits of different business application platforms as the first priority.”
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Close the Engagement Capacity Gap with Open CCaaS
When core routing systems are de-emphasized, an organization is freer to look at the business applications that will truly make a difference in closing the Engagement Capacity Gap. In fact, our latest Engagement Capacity Gap research shows that organizations that are highly confident in their ability to provide high-quality customer experiences are far more likely to make use of digital engagement channels to improve their customer experience.
Take a look at the next requirement of the digital contact center, where best of breed business applications make all the difference.
Download the 2023 Engagement Capacity Gap ResearchOpen CCaaS requires best-of-breed CX solutions
It is not good enough to simply provide additional channels to meet customer demands. What is really needed is best-of-breed applications — all purpose-built to elevate the customer experience.
As we saw earlier in the quote from Gartner, many CCaaS vendors lack depth and maturity in their solutions or digital channels, self-service, analytics, AI, and automation. Social media and messaging channels are growing at an astounding rate, and an organization can’t afford an approach that puts telephony at the center of all customer engagement. Because of the focus on telephony, additional channel and capabilities are add-ons. These point solutions are not best of breed, so though they may ‘tick a box’ on an RFP — they are not purpose built to provide the best CX possible.
Adding Channels is Not Enough
Further, providing a wide range of communication channels is not enough. To deliver exceptional customer experiences across channels, you must do more than simply offer channels. Best-of-breed solutions offer a range of capabilities to:
- Forecast and schedule agents across channels. It’s critical to find the right balance of staff across channels to provide the highest quality of service without overspending on resources. Advanced AI-based tools can provide accurate short and long-term forecasts while also giving your employees the tools to create flexible schedules that meet their needs.
- Provide insights and analytics about interactions across channels. When a customer service issue first occurs, it can quickly spread and become a disaster. Cross-channel insights and timely notifications can help an organization quickly spot and fix any issues that may affect customer sentiment.
- Measure and improve the quality of interactions across channels. You can’t improve your customer experience if you aren’t measuring it. Your platform needs the capabilities to measure the quality of interactions across all channels and provide the insights to see where agents need to improve.
Open CCaaS is built on automation
As interaction numbers rise and staffing levels remain flat, automation is your best option to continue providing a superior customer experience.
To scale better digital customer experiences, automation needs to be part of the experience, and you need a seamless way to make AI, automation and bots part of the customer engagement — with appropriate handover to a human when necessary. This provides a great customer experience and drives efficiencies.
AI and Automation is the Path to the Future for Contact Centers
Better digital CX
When you can automate a digital interaction in self-service, your customers get fast answers in the channel they prefer to use, and you provide that service at a fraction of the cost — a true win/win.
Automation in digital channels allows a brand to scale interactions and increase containment. Plus, if you can seamlessly integrate bot and human assisted interactions in a single conversation, you are able to support more simultaneous interactions.
Empowered agents
Self-service isn’t the only place to improve your processes with automation. Contact center agents have an extremely challenging job, trying to focus on many tasks simultaneously while helping customers.
Real-time automated assistance empowers agents with in-the-moment knowledge and context around customer sentiment and intent. This gives brands a powerful tool to assist employees as they work from anywhere to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Drive positive interaction outcomes
AI-powered bots comprehend what’s being said, how it’s being said and the corresponding agent’s actions and desktop activity, understanding the full interaction context to provide meaningful assistance in the moment to improve agent efficiency and reduce handle time.
By guiding agents on the next-best action, you can drive positive interaction outcomes and improve several key KPIs.
Open CCaaS unifies all of your engagement data
Legacy telephony based CCaaS systems claim to bring all of your engagement data together in one place. But the reality is that many times engagements are still siloed. What about a department that uses a different chat vendor, or a region that has a different telephony provider? What about emerging channels that we don’t even know about yet? And as these channels emerge at a faster and faster rate, a true omnichannel perspective becomes more and more critical. An organization cannot afford to have channel and workforce silos.
The digital contact center requires a new approach to engagement data. One that brings all your interaction data, including from external sources, together in one place, and can harmonize the diverse data types into a cohesive whole. When all your data is in one place, you can make truly data driven decisions to make lasting changes to your customer experience.
Introducing the Verint Engagement Data HubConclusion – Open CCaaS drives real business value
With the Verint Platform, customer experience automation comes first. For over 20 years, Verint has been providing market leading business applications, intended to seamlessly work with whatever current communication platforms are being used and insulating business users from negative impacts of disruption. Again, CRM, ACDs, telephony infrastructure — they alone will not close the Engagement Capacity Gap. Open CCaaS will.
The Verint Platform, with Verint Da Vinci AI & Analytics and the Engagement Data Hub at its core, brings the capabilities necessary to drive Customer Experience Automation across the platform, providing seamless experiences from self to assisted service, to automate, orchestrate and scale differentiated experiences.
Open CCaaS Delivers Real Benefits
The Verint Open CCaaS provides a wide variety of benefits, tied directly to Channel Automation, Total Quality, Workforce Orchestration and Omnichannel capabilities. Looking at Verint customers using our Open CCaaS solutions, there is clear ROI. Here are a just a few examples of the benefits our customers have experienced:
- A 41-point increase in NPS, while seeing a 50% reduction response times.
- 5 times more interactions per agent per hour with the introduction of asynchronous messaging channels.
- Cost per contact was reduced by 48% through the use of in-channel bots.
- 52% containment rate has been achieved by introducing AI and automation into customer engagements.
Open CCaaS means happier customers at a lower cost. With the Verint Platform, you have a true solution to close the Engagement Capacity Gap and a platform built for your future.
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