Why Best of Breed CX Solutions Offer Better ROI
November 27, 2023
When assessing which contact center technology to implement, most companies are looking for the holy grail of solutions—ones that reduce costs and elevate customer experiences.
First generation cloud contact center solutions are typically telephony-focused, with low-cost digital capabilities included as part of the same package. When organizations are weighing up different CCaaS providers, there is logic to thinking that spending less on ‘almost good enough’ solutions is the first step to reducing operational costs.
However, there is a hidden cost to implementing an inferior CCaaS platform. It may save money in the short term, but it leads to a less efficient contact center. Any cost savings are wiped out by wasting millions of precious minutes and countless poor customer experiences every year.
Instead, implementing market-leading solutions enables companies to provide superior CX, helping to create a more effective and efficient contact center that delivers significantly more ROI over time.
6 Best of Breed Open CCaaS Applications
Channel Automation
Verint’s 2023 State of Digital CX report found that 53% of consumers under 45 prefer to use digital channels to engage with a company. Younger consumers will be your customers for the long-term, and telephony-led CCaaS doesn’t offer the seamless omnichannel engagement they expect.
An open approach to CX is essential because organizations need to be able to engage customers across a range of channels such as WhatsApp, Live Chat and Facebook Messenger.
Verint Universal Channel Automation helps ensure that no matter where a customer reaches out, their query reaches the right agent (or bot) at the right time. Leveraging AI, it assesses factors such as interaction intent, customer history, workload and agent availability to deliver the best customer experience to route the conversation.
The open nature of the platform means the same level of routing intelligence for existing voice channels as it does for digital.
| Almost Good Enough | Best-of-Breed |
| Telephony-focused with limited routing for digital channels | Supports multiple ACDs with advanced routing for digital channels |
| Will only support a single ACD (automatic call distribution) | Capable of routing customer queries to bots and human agents |
| Difficult to add extra channels to existing routing system | Its open nature means companies can integrate their platform with any channels |
Conversational AI
Our advice on intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) is fairly simple—if you don’t have best-of-breed, it’s not worth using them for customer engagement.
We say this because a negative chatbot experience can lose companies nearly 1/3 of their customers. If consumers can’t get the answers they need or are frustrated when a bot doesn’t recognize the need to escalate to an agent, there’s a real chance of customer churn.
At its most effective, conversational AI eases the burden on agents in the contact center by enabling customers to self-serve and scaling those conversations across engagement channels.
Whether someone wants to pay a bill, book a flight or schedule an appointment, Verint’s industry-leading technology helps companies to deliver effortless, personalized experiences without the need for an agent to get involved.
| Almost Good Enough | Best-of-Breed |
| Can only cover a limited number of questions with basic keyword matching and FAQs | Understands natural language – so there is no set way a customer needs to ask a question |
| Often provides static and robotic responses to customer queries | Completes tasks and transactions without escalating to a human employee |
| Chatbots not connected to a company’s knowledge base, risking out-of-date and inaccurate answers | Recognizes when an interaction requires a handover to an agent and can do so seamlessly |
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management solutions should be the beating heart of the contact center. However, it’s not always the case because there’s a wide spectrum of options available.
They can vary from a set of FAQs on a website to a market-leading single source of truth which delivers the answers an employee or customer needs.
The importance of having a unified source of truth can’t be overstated.
It enables companies to deliver the right knowledge at the right time—reducing call volumes, improving the quality of support and driving ROI through improved knowledge development and delivery.
| Almost Good Enough | Best-of-Breed |
| Basic keyword search function limits an employee’s ability to quickly find the relevant information | AI-assisted search function makes locating the correct content swift and straightforward |
| Agents must manually search for answers to every question | Agent-assist suggests helpful knowledge articles in real-time during customer interactions |
| Siloed knowledge leads to inconsistent information available to agents working on different channels | A single source of truth with up-to-date information available to all agents, bots and customers |
Forecasting and Scheduling
There’s a delicate balance needed when scheduling shifts in a contact center. Organizations don’t want to overstaff and unnecessarily increase labor costs. Equally, understaffing leaves the workforce overwhelmed and customer wait times go up—employee and customer experience both suffer.
Verint Forecasting and Scheduling assesses historical data across multiple algorithms to project the most accurate interaction volumes across all engagement channels. It enables companies to meet customer demands and gives employees the ability to switch or adjust their schedules to fit their needs.
Labor is the most expensive resource in the contact center. Best-of-breed forecasting and scheduling ensures the extra costs incurred through increased overtime and unnecessary shifts are kept to a minimum.
| Almost Good Enough | Best-of-Breed |
| Forecasting based only on phone volume and not factoring in digital interactions | AI-powered long-term forecasts based on historical internal data and external factors |
| Limited to only scheduling for the contact center, not multiple locations and departments | Manages scheduling across various channels and departments |
| Struggle to provide environment which enables a good work/life balance for employees | Creates flexibility for workers needing to swap shifts or changes schedules at late notice |
Interaction Analytics
Having visibility into what is happening across every engagement channel is vital for organizations to understand the overall customer journey. Traditional CCaaS platforms fall short because they don’t offer accurate transcripts of interactions.
And, every aspect of interaction analytics, such as sentiment or trends, relies on knowing exactly what’s been said during a conversation.
An accurate transcript enables best-of-breed solutions to elevate CX and increase workforce effectiveness. Verint Real-Time Agent Assist can help agents in-the-moment to provide better customer experiences, and the Interaction Wrap-Up Bot uses generative AI to summarize interactions. All of this is possible because of next generation voice and text analytics.
| Almost Good Enough | Best-of-Breed |
| Inaccurate transcriptions which affect the ability to create actionable insights | Provides precise transcriptions under any circumstance – such as a noisy contact center or use of industry jargon |
| Any sentiment analysis must wait until an agent or bot has ended the interaction | Offers in-the-moment guidance to agents to ensure positive outcomes from customer interactions |
| Agents have to spend time post-interaction writing summaries of the conversation | Leverages generative AI to automatically write up after-call notes |
Total Quality
For many first generation CCaaS solutions, quality management isn’t automated and only covers phone calls, not digital channels. Generally, it’s a manual job which means organizations can’t do it at scale—so, only a small percentage are assessed annually.
It could mean tens or hundreds of thousands of non-compliant calls are slipping through the net each year.
To ensure as many conversations as possible are captured and analyzed, Verint Total Quality monitors up to 100% of interactions across voice, digital and bot channels, and relies on the accurate transcriptions and AI for its evaluations.
From these foundations, companies can offer targeted real-time coaching to agents during customer interactions, as well as combining the insights with customer feedback to drive better understanding of their CX offerings as a whole.
| Almost Good Enough | Best-of-Breed |
| Capable of only evaluating phone calls and not interactions on digital channels | Evaluates up to 100% of interactions taking place across all engagement channels |
| Only 1-3% of phone calls are manually analyzed | Enables real-time coaching for agents during a customer interaction |
| Coaching is based on the limited number of calls evaluated and only happens post-customer interaction | Combines interaction analytics with customer feedback for a holistic view of the customer experience |
Rolling out these solutions in your contact center will deliver significant ROI over time. The key is having an open platform that enables you to pick and choose market-leading solutions which meet the needs of your CX strategy.
Rather than a restrictive all-in-one package, Verint Open CCaaS platform enables an organization to bring its own telephony or CRM and integrate them with our best-of-breed applications. This level of flexibility means ecosystems can evolve over time, adapting as technology advances and keeping CX automation at the heart of customer engagement.
Learn more about Verint’s Open CCaaS platform and best of breed applications.