Zero Downtime, Maximum Impact: Strategies for CC and CX Excellence

Providing a fluid, satisfying experience for your customers is non-negotiable in a highly competitive business world.

But excellence in customer experience (CX) can be challenging, particularly in today’s modern, work-from-anywhere environments where contact centre (CC) agents and customers are so widely dispersed.

The cold hard facts are:

• Poor customer service costs businesses around $75 billion each year.
• 1 in 3 customers will abandon a brand after a single negative experience.

Customers will always remember a magical experience as clearly as a negative one. And with so many digital channels available to share these experiences with the world, businesses need to be hyper-aware of how mission critical a great communication experience with their customers has become.

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The transformation of contact centres

The rapid digital transformation of recent years has seen contact centres become an omnichannel hub for communications.

As well as providing customer service over phone calls, modern contact centres offer multiple channels for customers to get the information and the help that they need.

There are a number of challenges faced by both contact centre agents and customers, including:

1. Maintaining a seamless omnichannel experience – this includes creating a uniform experience and content, data integration across multiple channels, customer data security, seamless integration of the physical and digital experience.
2. Maintaining voice quality, uptime, and resiliency – voice accounts for 30% of today’s contact centre interactions, so modern voice architecture and connectivity needs to enable 100% uptime.
3. Managing a hybrid contact centre workforce – the work-from anywhere model has significantly stressed contact centres in recent years. Whether in a remote situation or on premises, calls are in real time. Frozen screens, audio dropout, microphone failure or speaker glitches still need to be addressed in real time.
4. Integrating AI seamlessly into the omnichannel experience – AI self-service allows customers to engage on their terms through multiple channels, webchat, emails, SMS, voice, mobile in-app messaging etc. Transferring from AI to human requires vigilant monitoring and rigorous testing and is absolutely crucial to the customer experience.
5. Integrating on-premises devices with various cloud-based applications - Seamless integration is about keeping the things that work and are necessary to keep on-prem (such as voice recording systems) and integrating them with cloud services.
6. Visibility challenges - You need to be able to see into what’s happening with on-prem services, cloud services and remote agents. If you can’t see what’s going on simultaneously throughout your environments, it can be time consuming and labour intensive to troubleshoot issues quickly. Without an end-to-end view, if one element breaks down, or there’s a problem you can’t see, it results in downtime and potential loss of customers.
7. Asynchronous communication - The importance of enabling multiple communication methods. Voice is important, but people are demanding the option to communicate through the channel of their choice, including online, webchat, email etc. AI and digital methods play a big part in communication, but human interaction must be seamlessly incorporated when needed.
8. Bringing digital back to voice – transcription services have become so accurate that your customers can have a voice conversation with a digital bot. The challenge is leveraging voice with other digital channels.
9. The importance of continuous monitoring and testing – There are hundreds of different problems that can occur; Firewall issues, wireless signal strength, ISP issues.

A continuous monitoring capability oversees call quality, and network connectivity.

Through remote assistance, testing can be carried out at the click of a button, from device tests, wireless, signal strength, SSID reporting, speed tests, voice quality tests etc. so engineers can respond immediately to this data, minimizing disruption and downtime.

Want to know more about how you can create watertight CC operations and build resilience to deliver exceptional CX every time? Listen to our experts for cutting edge insights and firsthand experiences from top-performing organisations.