Choosing the Right Contact Centre Platform

Introduction

As the contact center has grown in strategic importance, more organizations recognize that delivering exceptional experiences not only reduces costs — it drives growth, increases customer loyalty and enhances employee engagement.

Choosing the right contact center platform is a business imperative. And with the breadth of customer experience (CX) technology in the marketplace — from full platform solutions to point tools — the decision can feel daunting.

Wherever you are on your journey toward orchestrating more strategic customer experiences, this guide will help you understand key CX and employee experience (EX) technologies.

For organizations that are early in the CX transformation journey, this guide will offer practical advice on how to turn on features that can deliver quick wins and time to value. If your organization is further along in the journey, we’ll detail how advanced AI-powered capabilities can deliver even better customer and employee experiences.

The five key areas of contact center evaluation

Selecting the right contact center platform is a decision that impacts multiple areas of your business. Use this guide during your evaluation process to ensure you vet the capabilities that can drive differentiation in and around your contact center. Whether you’re early in your journey or ready to take advanced steps toward AI-powered transformation, these five key platform areas are core to driving enhanced customer and employee experiences:

To help you during your vendor evaluation process, each section in this guide includes key questions to ask in each of these five core platform areas, and what to look for in their responses.

Realize faster value with AI and automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are transforming how brands interact with their customers and employees, unlocking opportunities for businesses to anticipate customer needs and create hyperpersonalized experiences at scale.

When selecting the right AI-powered contact center solution, it’s essential to consider these key areas:

• Real-time data collection and analysis to generate actionable insights from customer behavior, enabling businesses to confidently adapt to customer needs
• User-friendly capabilities to power seamless integrations with existing systems
• Security, transparency and ethical AI components that adhere to stringent data privacy standards

When AI underpins CX and EX services, the AI-powered data enables brands to target specific use cases to improve customer and employee experiences — and drive business outcomes.

Draw intelligence from every interaction

Within the contact center, a platform must be built with AI to enable output that is always connected to the context of an interaction. Bolt-on AI solutions can’t meet the complex needs of both customers and employees. To truly succeed, AI must be embedded directly where it can drive the most impact — whether for customer interactions or employee workflows. A modern CX platform with native AI capabilities continuously learns and draws intelligence from every touchpoint, generating outcomes that are contextual to better understand and adapt to your customer and employee journeys.

Achieve instant value and ROI

As you invest in AI to advance toward your business goals, you need to see results from Day One. An out-of-the-box solution empowers your team to activate AI capabilities without specialized training or resources. And when you’re ready to take the next step toward AI-powered CX and EX transformation, your platform of choice should deliver built-in capabilities that can be extended with third-party AI. Whether you’re looking for an out- of-the-box solution or one that can be customized to your exact business needs, look for a comprehensive platform with AI that is effortless to adopt, easy to maintain and drives immediate results.

Expand with confidence

AI-powered tools have become vital to business growth. Brands have a renewed focus on ethical AI considerations, as many regions require ethical usage of AI to meet specific regulations. A platform built with ethical AI ensures data is:

• Collected from customers who have explicitly opted in
• Anonymized and never shared
• Human validated before use in training
• Rigorously tested to verify results

Adhering to global and regional compliance certifications and regulations must be a top priority as well. As your business grows, you need your contact center technology backed by comprehensive global, regional and national certifications to enable seamless data access, regulatory compliance and accelerated time to market.

Safeguard your data

AI should be built into a secure foundation — not tacked on and managed as a separate tool. Data integrity and ownership rights should be fundamental to a vendor’s AI services. A secure AI model uses customer-approved anonymized datasets that have been reviewed and validated by humans. And when it comes to your data, your voice matters. Ensure that your vendor actively solicits and incorporates your feedback to help you understand the rationale behind AI-driven actions to identify potential biases and maintain trust with customers and employees.

Modernize your tech stack for accelerated innovation

A mature open platform offers you flexibility to move fast with a comprehensive set of turnkey capabilities. If you’re ready for an advanced deployment, choose a platform that also enables your developers to create bespoke solutions that drive differentiation. Many companies want the flexibility to lean into both approaches as their business needs evolve.

Your customers, employees and business objectives are unique, and they require a modern, extensible and microservices-based architecture that can be fully customized to meet your exact business requirements. When your business can extend your technology to address industry specific requirements and drive business outcomes, you unlock opportunities to create value faster.

Consider the wide range of platforms that comprise your technology ecosystem. Now imagine having the ability to seamlessly and securely gather CX data from each platform. This comprehensive set of data powers better outcomes, providing your business with the data-backed context required to create personalized customer and employee experiences.

Uniform, comprehensive CCaaS platform

Leveraging a uniform, comprehensive platform can reduce your tech footprint, provide a lower cost of ownership and ensure you’re always available with a comprehensive set of pre-integrated microservices — all built on a single codebase. A platform built with an autoscaling microservice architecture is designed to provide instant and virtually unlimited scale to support even your most demanding workloads. Proven, guaranteed availability is paramount to running your business. In the event of a failure, you need an open platform that can recover on its own without service disruption or data loss.

Innovation at speed and scale

Stay one step ahead of market shifts, business requirements and your competition with a cloud platform that rapidly and continuously releases new capabilities. Easily turn on product features as existing systems age out or new opportunities arise. And when you need to speed time to value, rely on apps and prebuilt integrations that can drive expedited results.

Secure global reach and local presence

Keeping your customers’ data secure and compliant is your top priority — no matter the location of your operations. As you evaluate platforms, keep these criteria top of mind:

• A shared security model to reduce your security team’s operational responsibilities and offer higher standards of security than most organizations can achieve in-house
• Multiple layers of data safeguards and controls to maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your customers’ data
• A comprehensive set of compliance certifications and attestations that validate the vendor’s commitment to helping you operate within a complex global regulatory environment
• Confirmation that your data won’t be used for product improvements without your explicit consent. And if you do give consent, ensure you’ll have full visibility into how the data is used and applied.

« We selected Genesys Cloud because we think it has the best combination of being feature-rich and developer-friendly. It’s got great API suites, so you get the best of both worlds there. »

–Richard Tucker, Head of Software Engineering, OVO Energy

Optimize experiences with customer journey management

From sales and marketing to product and customer success, your customers leave data trails across interactions with multiple business functions. Unlocking a comprehensive view of your customer journeys enables your business to visualize, measure and optimize experiences across digital and voice interactions, aligning journey outcomes with key business KPIs to drive operational efficiency and strategic impact. With customer journey management, you can go beyond isolated roadblocks to consistently identify issues along the entire journey, implement real-time updates and evaluate their impact. By uncovering previously hidden insights into customer behaviors, you can make informed, data-driven decisions that enhance the overall customer experience.

Unify your customer journey data

To deliver exceptional experiences, you need a comprehensive, data-driven view of customer journeys. An event data platform consolidates, augments and enriches data to create unified customer profiles and holistic behavioral sequences. This enables continuous analytics and provides AI-ready data for effective journey management.

With a unified view of customer interactions, you can make real-time adjustments to enhance the journey experience. Choose a platform featuring tools that enable you to easily visualize both individual and aggregate customer behaviors, uncovering patterns, identifying bottlenecks and addressing friction points across channels. And of course, your customer journey data must be generated and sourced with security and compliance as top priorities.

Rapidly uncover journey insights

Creating optimized customer experiences requires analytics that enable your staff to measure and monitor customer behavior and quickly understand its impact on business performance. Leverage data-driven journey visualization and analysis to examine cross-channel behaviors across both self-service and agent-supported interactions. This approach enables you to uncover improvement opportunities, identify root causes of poor experiences and address performance challenges. Move beyond traditional contact center metrics to assess how customer behavior influences self-service containment rates, abandonment and churn.

Orchestrate powerful journeys

The key to creating a powerful customer journey is infusing every interaction with rich journey insights. A single view of your customer journeys allows you to prioritize improvements that significantly impact customers, employees and overall business performance. Leverage real-time and historical data to anticipate customer needs and deliver interactions tailored to their goals. Compare journey options side by side to identify best practices, and continuously refine and personalize experiences for lasting impact.

As you optimize your journeys, make decisions based on each customer’s prior experiences — not just their most recent interaction. Engage your customers at optimal points along their journey, in real time and through the most effective channels.

Power seamless digital customer engagement

Over the last few years, businesses have rapidly adopted digital channels to increase touchpoints across the customer journey. Brands are now focused on delivering fluid, personalized digital experiences that are powered by data-backed context. While today’s customers interact with brands across multiple channels, they think about their interactions as one continuous conversation. And they expect their unique context to carry over at every touchpoint — whether it’s an email, social media chat or SMS message. A contact center platform built with a comprehensive digital suite enables brands to access a full view of customer interactions and engage with customers with the right message at the right time — on the channels they prefer.

Create a unified digital experience

With a 360-degree view of customer touchpoints and contextual data, you can deliver personalized and proactive engagement, drive operational efficiencies and give customers flexibility to engage when and where they want. And when a digital interaction requires human intervention, the hand-off should be seamless. Select a platform that ensures your agents are enabled with AI-powered transcriptions that provide bot-led conversations at a minimum. For maximum impact, customer context across all prior interactions should be captured and analyzed to drive conversations forward and accelerate time to resolution.

Powerful personalization at scale

A comprehensive suite of digital capabilities enables you to connect and refine data around each of your customers’ unique experiences, so you can deliver rich, meaningful and relevant interactions. When your customers and prospects interact with your bots, agents and content, they’re offering insight into who they are and what they want. Use these insights and predictive engagement to drive perfectly timed interactions, such as providing an offer to boost conversion rates or intercepting a customer call from a contact page. And when your customers reach out for help or guidance, your data can power predictive routing to ensure they’re connected to the agent who is best qualified to assist them.

Continuous optimization for real-time improvements

With real-time monitoring of customer interactions, you can unlock a view of customer activity across multiple channels. Leverage this data to quickly improve AI in the contact center, getting a sense of customer inquiries and developing an appropriate knowledge base to fuel self-service and agent assistance. This data also enables you to identify which parts of the journey are working and where potential bottlenecks exist. With comprehensive KPIs and analytics, you can make real-time adjustments and craft a strategic plan to optimize resources in the future.

Unlock employee potential with workforce engagement management

Unlocking the full potential of your most valuable resource – your people – is essential to enhancing customer experiences. Workforce engagement management (WEM) brings together four key areas of the contact center into one view:

• Workforce management
• Quality management
• Employee performance
• Contact center operations

A comprehensive contact center platform with native WEM capabilities enables businesses to reduce costs, increase customer loyalty and maximize employee engagement. When omnichannel interaction and customer data, routing and more are connected to employee experience data, brands can unlock a unified data layer for robust analysis and optimization.

Simplify management

Natively built WEM tools enable businesses to keep their investment simple and consolidated with all capabilities in one place. With a comprehensive platform, you can streamline management, reduce operational overhead and get a complete picture of team performance in one view. A single platform for all capabilities means simplified development and lower costs without the complexity of bolt-on WEM solutions.

Accelerate employee impact

Native AI accelerates employee impact by providing actionable insights and automating routine tasks, enabling teams to focus on higher-value activities. To best serve rising customer expectations, your employees need to be equipped with relevant context at every interaction. An intuitive agent interface is built with users in mind, delivering relevant customer context and knowledge that guides them to the next-best action.

Increase employee retention

Building a culture your workforce loves is the foundation of driving strong employee retention and creating elevated customer experiences. With AI-powered forecasting and a schedule first approach, agents enjoy flexibility, and planners are equipped with more accurate schedule and forecasting tools to better optimize resources and avoid under- or overstaffing.

A key component of driving employee retention is creating opportunities for your staff to drive their learning and development experiences. Empower your employees to continuously enhance their knowledge with gamified experiences that give them the ability to set, monitor and visualize performance in line with individual and personalized objectives that are aligned with key business goals.

Discover how Genesys Cloud can help you deliver the future of customer and employee experience with AI-Powered Experience Orchestration