3 Ways Cloud Contact Center Solutions Enable Innovation

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It’s easy for contact centers to build a business case for adopting cloud technology – reasons ranging from meeting the needs of today’s customers to finding an economical path to modernizing the contact center. While these approaches will all help contact centers catch up to what customers expect in 2021, they don’t speak to what will be needed going forward to adapt to a constantly-changing environment, where customer needs and expectations do not stand still.

To address this, contact center leaders need to think about innovation and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how cloud-based contact center solutions enable them to keep pace. Here are three examples to illustrate.

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1. Cloud Contact Center Solutions Help Organizations Remain Current with Applications

While improving CX may be the ultimate objective for the contact center, innovation can take many forms across various touchpoints and vectors that comprise the full CX story. The focus of innovation isn’t on CX itself, but rather the various elements that incrementally improve customer service.

Consider how contact centers must keep adding new digital communication channels for customers, such as web chat, messaging, and video. As new channels are added, new data streams will be generated and supervisors will need better reporting tools to manage it all. Similarly, agents will need new features on the desktop to track all this activity and ensure that pertinent information is readily accessible. As new applications are added, seamless forms of integration will be needed across various platforms.

All of these examples are driven by technology that is always changing, improving and innovating. As such, innovation doesn’t come from one place, it comprises the full spectrum of CX and cloud contact center solutions help organizations to get current and stay current.

2. AI Puts You Ahead of the Curve 

Most forms of innovation result in small improvements that still add value. Other forms of innovation can be more transformative, and AI is a prime example. All contact center vendors have an AI story now, which is helping to meet the demand as more contact centers begin to include AI in their CX plans. In fact, the Canam Call Center AI Benchmark Trend Report cites that 78% of contact centers in the U.S. are planning to utilize AI technology in the next three years.

AI enables entirely new capabilities, such as intelligent routing, dynamic journey mapping, predictive analytics and sentiment analysis. Not only can conversational AI help automate self-service, but it can also deliver a more personalized CX.

These are transformative capabilities contact centers should be looking for – not just to make operations more efficient, but to improve agent engagement and elevate CX. To some extent, you can get these outcomes from incremental forms of innovation, but change happens faster now and AI offers a more impactful way to innovate. The further behind contact centers are for meeting CX expectations, the more compelling AI becomes to quickly close the gap – and a cloud deployment model can help you get there.

3. Cloud Innovation Helps You Keep Pace with Evolving CX

Focusing on specific applications or technologies is important, but there’s a bigger and more strategic perspective to keep in mind. All too often, organizations take a reactive approach to innovation by deploying new contact center solutions to deal with problems as they happen. Instead, contact center leaders should embrace innovation as a state of being and not as a one-and-done approach to problem-solving.

The strategic rationale here for cloud is to put the contact center in a position to always be current as needs emerge. Whether innovation comes in small pieces or major forms of disruption, the proactive approach is to be agile enough to adopt forms of change that will automate processes, improve self-service and keep CX levels high.