What Is a Digital Contact Center?

Once solely reliant on telephony for customer engagement, contact centers now embrace a diverse array of digital channels, including email, live chat, social media, and messaging apps. This evolution has been driven by a shifting landscape of changing customer preferences and technological advancements.

Today’s consumers demand seamless, omnichannel experiences—and businesses recognize the importance of meeting them where they are. By embracing digital channels, contact centers can enhance accessibility, efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Whether it’s resolving queries via social media messaging, troubleshooting on live chat, or offering personalized assistance through an intelligent virtual assistant, the modern contact center is equipped to engage customers on their terms.

But a digital contact center isn’t just about the channels it supports. It’s about using the latest technology to enable CX automation, leveraging AI-powered bots to augment the human workforce, and enabling customers to self-serve at scale.

This evolution represents a paradigm shift in customer service, one that prioritizes adaptability, agility, and the continuous pursuit of customer-centric solutions.

Here, we’ll unpack the key elements of the digital contact center, including:

• The role of telephony
• Digital channels
• Interaction routing
• AI-powered self-service
• Knowledge management
• Engagement data insights

Why Telephony Is Still Key in the Digital Contact Center

Despite the increasing number of digital channels, telephony is still a vital component of the modern contact center. Bolstered by the integration of intelligent virtual assistants (IVA), the voice channel has evolved to enable exceptional customer experiences at scale.

Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) for voice empower customers to self-serve, leveraging natural language processing to handle diverse tasks, from simply providing information to booking an appointment or resolving more complex issues.

Also, it’s important to remember that human agents are still at the heart of the digital contact center. IVAs need to understand when a customer needs to be transferred to an agent while also giving the agent the context of the conversation up to that point, meaning the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves.

Verint’s unique approach to contact center technology allows traditional contact centers to adopt IVAs without disruption. Businesses can retain their existing automatic call distributor (ACD) infrastructure while embracing Verint IVA.

What’s more, existing telephony solutions can be integrated right alongside digital channels, enabling agents to work seamlessly across voice and digital in a single agent workspace.

De-siloing Digital Channels Is Vital

Customers now expect businesses to offer customer service via digital channels such as email, live chat, private messaging apps, and social media. Businesses simply decide which channel or channels are best suited for their customers. Some take an omnichannel approach, aiming to cover all bases by engaging customers across numerous channels, while others prefer to direct their resources to just one or two channels that they can then optimize.

When it comes to contact center operations, it’s vital that interactions on digital channels don’t occur in silos. For example, if live chat conversations are handled by agents via a separate solution, they are inhibited by a lack of contextual information from other channels. This limits them to offering a substandard, disjointed service.

Agents need to be able to work effortlessly across voice and digital channels in a single agent workspace to provide streamlined customer experience that can start on one channel and continue on another.

Interaction Routing Gets the AI Treatment

The idea of de-siloing channels to enable a seamless customer experience starts with the way that interactions are routed. Digital contact centers turn routing a customer to the right channel or agent into a science.

By leveraging AI, businesses can intelligently analyze customer inquiries in real time, using context to accurately determine their intent. This enables accurate routing to the most appropriate agent or bot, reducing average handle time and improving first interaction resolution.

While many contact center vendors offer separate routing capabilities for telephony and digital channels, Verint is uniquely positioned by providing a single AI-powered solution to route interactions—regardless of the communication channel. This helps ensure the right resource is onhand at the right time to deliver the best possible service.

By unifying the routing of digital and voice interactions, businesses can optimize operational efficiency, boost agent productivity, and ultimately elevate customer satisfaction levels.

AI-powered Self-Service Helps Meet Demand

Customer expectations and interaction volumes continue to rise while contact center budgets are constrained. You can’t keep hiring more agents—the only (realistic) solution is automation.

AI-powered self-service should be at the heart of every digital contact center. But how businesses choose to implement this technology is of paramount importance. The State of Customer Experience 2023 found that 64% of customers have had a negative experience with chatbots, despite 80% understanding the benefits of using them.

Customers want quick, accurate service from bots—they just rarely receive it.

Verint Voice and Digital Containment Bots work across (you guessed it) voice and digital channels to provide seamless self-service at scale. They’re trained on decades of rich engagement data to provide personalized, contextual assistance that helps to reduce support costs while improving the customer experience.

They also train on businesses’ unique engagement data to help ensure they offer service that’s tailored to the specific needs of their customers.

The containment bots are powered by Verint IVA, which allows you to quickly and easily build AI-powered virtual assistants in a low-code/pro-code visualized environment called IVA Studio.

Here, even non-programmers can fine-tune the virtual assistant, design conversational flows, and also monitor the bots’ performance through conversational analytics.

Knowledge Is Power for the Digital Contact Center

The success of a digital contact center relies on instant access to information. A knowledge base serves as the single source of truth for efficient operations, ensuring that agents and bots can promptly address customer inquiries while maintaining consistency across interactions.

Traditionally, a knowledge management solution required agents to manually search for the information they need while handling a customer interaction. Modern solutions such as Verint Knowledge Management use AI to remove the burden from agents.

The Knowledge Suggestion Bot presents context-specific knowledge to agents in real time during a customer interaction. By delivering relevant knowledge into workflows at every relevant step, agents can reduce average handle time by up to 30 seconds per interaction, increase first-call resolutions, and improve CSAT scores.

Verint Knowledge Management can be integrated with many other solutions within the Verint Open Platform and pass context across solutions to drive a seamless, personalized experience for both agents and customers.

Leveraging Engagement Data Insights

Delivering effortless CX across voice and digital channels is easier said than done. Unlocking the power of engagement data insights across all channels is key for contact centers aiming to stay ahead in today’s competitive landscape.

Businesses need visibility into crucial metrics such as average handle time, call volume, and top interaction drivers by channel. This real-time data allows for informed decision-making and proactive adjustments to optimize performance.

Verint makes it easy for contact centers to access these insights in one place. Queue status reports offer a comprehensive view of contact center KPIs, enabling teams to identify trends and areas for improvement across different channels and queues.

For those seeking tailored insights, custom dashboards are available, ensuring that businesses can extract maximum value from their engagement data. By leveraging these insights effectively, contact centers can enhance operational efficiency and drive greater customer satisfaction.

Introducing Verint Open CCaaS Essentials

Verint Open CCaaS Essentials is a comprehensive solution that equips businesses with a full suite of digital capabilities, empowering them to transform their customer experience.

With Verint Open CCaaS Essentials, businesses have the flexibility to choose a blend of digital and voice agents, leveraging Verint’s cutting-edge features such as bring your own telephony (BYOT), AI-powered routing, and a single agent workspace.

Verint Open CCaaS Essentials is powered by Verint Open Platform with Verint Engagement Data Hub and Verint Da Vinci^TM AI, enabling businesses to benefit from:

• AI-powered self-service for cross-channel customer experience that increases containment
• AI-driven routing that contextually routes interactions to the right resource for lower support costs and increased first call resolution
• A unified workforce across channels that delivers the operational efficiencies of blended voice and digital agents
• Unified engagement data that powers actionable insights for all interactions for further containment and CX improvements.

Learn more about Verint Open CCaaS Essentials