3 Reasons Your Contact Center Needs to Go Digital | Calabrio
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3 Reasons Your Contact Center Needs to Go Digital

When you close your eyes and imagine a contact center, what do you see? Is it a dim and dusty room filled with rows of headset wearing agents, half-heartedly responding to customer complaints? Or, is it a buzzing and dynamic environment equipped with 21st century customer engagement and analytics technology that empowers businesses to predict customer needs?

If you saw the second scene, welcome to the digital age – and new reality – of the contact center. If you saw the first, it’s time you joined the rest of us.

As companies increasingly adopt an omnichannel approach to customer engagement, new levels of importance are being placed on the contact center’s ability to analyze the data coming from every channel.

But, if the cost of going digital still seems to outweigh the benefits to your team, here are three reasons why you should reconsider.

  1. Your customers are already looking to connect with you digitally.
    Given the ubiquity of personal communication channels today—Facebook, Twitter, What’sApp, Slack, and so on – it’s no surprise many customers, especially those who fall into Gen X and Y, are using these same channels to reach out to the companies that they buy from.
    Gone are the days when a customer’s first instinct was to pick up the phone to contact his or her cable provider or airline carrier. Customers are writing emails, posting on social media and text messaging to get through to your business. Why? For one thing, it’s more convenient. Many have realized it’s faster to “take to the Twittersphere” than to wait on hold or navigate automated menus.
  2. Analyzing multiple avenues of communication is just the start.
    The important part is analyzing data across channels, rather than in silos, to develop a complete view of the customer.
    As a result, companies must be able to analyze and aggregate data from each of these interaction channels to better understand their customers. If they are not, they run the risk of missing valuable insights, leading to poor interaction with customers and customer churn.
  3. After successfully integrating omnichannel data, the contact center has the opportunity to be seen by executives as a fundamental step on the customer journey.
    This is important because contact centers can often be ignored when sales and marketing strategy decisions are being made.
    It’s not that executives don’t consider the information valuable, but that there is a misunderstanding about where the customer journey starts and ends.

The reality is that it doesn’t end. Post-sale data is just as pertinent to pre-sale strategy as audience segmentation. Therefore it’s critical that contact centers make a space for themselves at the table. Without omnichannel contact center data, executives have only a limited view of customers, which can negatively impact a brand’s overarching strategy.

Learn more about how omnichannel is driving contact centers to go digital.

Brad Snedeker is the Director of Customer Advocacy at Calabrio. With over 15 years in the industry, Brad has extensive knowledge of the contact center space. As Calabrio’s head of the Innovation Center, he works directly with users to teach and develop new and innovative techniques to implement customer engagement and WFO best practices.
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