The State of the Contact Center
Although typically associated with customer service operations, contact centers can also be used to help employees, shareholders, business partners, and other constituents get the information they need. Technology to support contact centers has been around for decades, but legacy solutions are often cumbersome to maintain, complicated to operationalize, costly, and built on unreliable premises-based technology.
At the same time, the role of the contact center has expanded and evolved with the proliferation of digital media, e-commerce, and changes in customer behavior. Most notably, customer relationships are less likely to be face-to-face today than in the past. Salesforce.com reported that 57% of customers now prefer to engage through digital channels; that number rises to 65% for millennials and Generation X buyers. For some companies, the contact center is now the most direct interaction they ever have with customers, making it a key focus of experience improvement initiatives.This dynamic has amplified the limitations of legacy on-premises technology, which requires costly upgrades to enable advanced features — if those features can be implemented at all. These shortcomings hinder the ability to respond quickly to a customer while integrating seamlessly with other productivity tools. Solving the customer’s problem often requires accessing multiple information sources and subject matter experts, a frustrating task with yesterday’s closed-loop systems that were designed mainly for call routing.
Legacy environments are also inherently less secure than modern ones. “The risk to the business is acute with legacy technology,” says Chris Hardy, enterprise architect, Kyndryl Digital Workplace Global Practice. “As we integrate with modern experiences, the risk of data breaches increases in scope, and it only takes one instance to severely impact the bottom line.”Contact centers have assumed additional importance as business executives have turned more attention to improving customer experience. In a survey of nearly 2,000 business professionals by SuperOffice, 46% of the respondents rated customer experience as their top priority over the next five years, well ahead of the No. 2 objective: product improvements. There is good reason for their concern. Qualtrics research found that 80% of consumers have switched brands because of a bad experience and that half of those people said that it has taken just one bad experience to prompt them to switch. Qualtrics estimates that negative customer experiences cost companies an average of 8% of their annual revenue. Given that experts say that it can be up to seven times as expensive to find a new customer than to keep an existing one, the focus on retention isn’t surprising. Internal contact centers that answer employees’ questions about topics such as benefits and job postings or that provide IT help desk support have also improved employee experiences. This utility has become particularly important amid labor shortages and increased turnover since the onset of COVID-19. Happy employees also make for happy customers. In an IDC survey, 85% of the participating executives agreed that improved employee experience translates into better customer experience and higher revenues.
