Five Reasons Why a New Approach to CCaaS Is Needed

In the ever-evolving landscape of customer service, delivering elevated customer experience (CX) is the holy grail for businesses seeking to outshine their competitors. 

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions have emerged as a powerful tool to enhance CX. However, not all CCaaS platforms are created equal. Some might hinder your quest for delivering exceptional experiences rather than support it. In this blog post, we’ll explore five reasons why a new approach to CCaaS is needed to achieve exceptional CX.

CCaaS Solutions Can Be Inflexible 

While the idea of an all-in-one cloud contact center solution may seem tempting, it can limit your flexibility. Many all-in-one CCaaS providers force you into a one-size-fits-all approach, which may not align with your unique business needs. 

For example, you may have an exceptional telephony provider, but they lock you into their substandard live chat and social messaging capabilities. While it’s arguably easier to consolidate your customer engagement solutions with one vendor, it doesn’t pay to use solutions that are merely ‘good enough’.

To avoid this pitfall, opt for CCaaS solutions that offer flexibility and choice. Look for platforms that allow you to integrate third-party applications and technologies easily. This way you can tailor your CX strategy to your specific requirements and adopt best-of-breed solutions where needed.

It’s Difficult and Expensive to Integrate with External APIs

A CCaaS platform that doesn’t play well with others can be a significant obstacle to achieving great CX. If your CCaaS solution is closed or makes it expensive and challenging to integrate with external APIs, it can limit your ability to leverage the latest CX technologies and innovations.

Choose a CCaaS platform that embraces openness and encourages integration with external APIs. This openness enables you to adapt quickly to changing customer expectations and integrate emerging technologies seamlessly into your CX strategy.

Your CX Data Resides in Silos

Data is the lifeblood of any CX strategy. If your CCaaS system keeps your data locked in silos, you’re in trouble. 

Siloed data means that information is isolated and fragmented across various departments, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of your customers. When data is fragmented, your agents won’t have access to the unified customer history they need to provide personalized and efficient service.

To overcome this issue, opt for CCaaS solutions that offer robust data integration capabilities. An ideal CCaaS platform should seamlessly connect with your CRM, marketing automation, and voice of customer solutions. This ensures your agents have a comprehensive view of each customer’s history and needs, as well as broader insights into the customer experience and journey.

AI Is Not at the Core of Your CCaaS Solutions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized CX. If your CCaaS solution doesn’t leverage AI or only uses it superficially, you’re missing out on a powerful tool to elevate your CX.

An AI-driven CCaaS platform can automate routine tasks, provide real-time customer insights, and even predict customer needs—allowing your agents to focus on complex issues and provide exceptional service. 

At Verint, we believe AI needs to be seamlessly integrated into workflows and continuously trained on customer engagement data. Effective bots are always improving and support the work that customers or agents need to do—at the time and place they are already working.

We have several specialized bots ready to help serve your agents and customers, including:

Digital and Voice Containment Bots: Uses natural language understanding (NLU)-based AI to efficiently automate conversations with customers across digital and voice channels. With this bot, you can provide personalized self-service experiences that resolve customer queries, and identify which interactions should be escalated to assisted service.

Self-Service and Agent Interaction Transfer Bots: Many customer journeys start with a self-service bot. At times, the interaction is transferred to an agent, who needs to fully understand the situation. Previously, the agent had to read a transcript of the bot conversation or, worse, ask the customer to repeat the information that was just relayed to the bot.  With Verint Interaction Transfer Bot, the agent is presented with a summary of the self-service interaction, making it easy to quickly understand the reason for the transfer.

Interaction Wrap-Up Bot: Puts the power of generative AI at your fingertips to eliminate after-call work. Over the course of the call, Verint Real-Time Transcription listens to every word and creates an accurate transcription. As soon as the call is complete, the transcription is fed into the Interaction Wrap-Up Bot, which uses generative AI to produce a short summary of all the activities on the call. The agent sees the summary on their wrap-up screen and can add any information needed. Organizations can save millions by dramatically cutting after-call work time on every single call.

Teams Are Not Connected – Data, Skills, and Knowledge Only Exist Within the Contact Center

The contact center is just one piece of the CX puzzle. If your CCaaS solution isolates your contact center from the rest of your organization, you’re missing out on opportunities for a seamless and consistent CX across all touchpoints.

Elevated customer experiences require data, skills, and insights to flow freely across departments, from the contact center to the back office and beyond. Choose a CCaaS platform that fosters connectivity and collaboration among your teams, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working toward the same CX goals.

Benefits of Taking an Open Approach to CCaaS Solutions

Now that we’ve identified these five reasons your CCaaS may be holding you back, it’s essential to understand the benefits of taking a more open approach to contact center technology. An open CCaaS platform allows you to use best-of-breed solutions across the entire customer journey. 

This flexibility empowers you to:

Remain Agile: You can adapt to evolving customer needs and market trends by easily integrating new technologies and tools into your CX strategy.

Tailor CX: Customization becomes a breeze, enabling you to design CX solutions that align with your brand and customer expectations.

Maximize ROI: By choosing the best solutions for each aspect of your CX, you can help ensure that your investments deliver maximum returns.

Enhance CX Consistency: With a connected ecosystem, you can maintain a consistent and seamless CX across all customer touchpoints, driving customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Delivering exceptional CX requires a CCaaS solution that helps you to break down data silos, embraces AI, offers flexibility, encourages integration, and fosters connectivity among your teams. 

By taking a more open approach to CCaaS, you’ll be well on your way to achieving a CX that stands out in today’s competitive market.

Read more about Verint’s open approach to CCaaS and how it helps to unleash the power of AI.