The experience you offer to your customers has arguably never been more important to your business. Consumers are as discerning as they’ve ever been and have an abundance of choice as to where to spend their money. They expect effective, responsive customer service on all their favored communications channels. That’s where digital contact center solutions come in.
Long gone are the days of call centers with agents based solely on-premises, and the lengthy call queues they often presented to customers. Your business needs a modern solution that lets your agents swiftly and seamlessly serve customers across the channels their customers prefer to use. It needs a digital contact center platform like RingCentral RingCX.
What is a digital contact center?
A digital contact center is exactly as it sounds; a customer contact center that’s undergone a digital transformation to offer customers a seamless communication experience.
The solutions are software-based and hosted in the cloud, allowing agents to manage a range of communications channels from virtually anywhere with an internet connection. For that reason, digital contact centers are also often known as cloud-based contact centers as they’ve shed their reliance on on-premises hardware.
A recap: What’s the difference between a contact center and a call center?
Before we continue our explanation of digital contact centers, let’s take a step back. What do we actually mean by a contact center rather than a call center?
A call center was the traditional way to connect with customers in the days before we carried the internet around in our pockets. Call centers only deal with voice calls, whereas contact centers connect with customers across the wider range of communication channels now readily available to them.
After all, many customers now prefer digital experiences to interact with an organization. Rather than pick up the phone and dial your number, they’ll start a chat conversation on your website or in your mobile app. Multiple channels of communication enable contact centers to offer a higher level of customer support.
Of course, call centers may be digitized these days, too, often using internet phones and some level of automation—such as recorded messages and menus (“press two for accounts”)--but they’re still restricted to telephony.
Now, a contact center could still utilize primarily on-premises hardware and restrict agents to working in just one physical location. More often, however, they reflect the more mobile and responsive nature of our modern world by leveraging cloud-based, fully digital technology.
A contact center with full digital functionality integrates channels such as business SMS, social media messaging, and more—as well as tech including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). All of this helps agents to follow a customer journey across multiple channels.
Going digital also helps a contact center to be more proactive. Instead of just reacting to customer issues, cloud contact center solutions can more easily leverage analytics to predict common problems, provide personalized support, and significantly improve customer experiences.
A digital contact center solution like RingCentral RingCX offers a whole suite of tools and features to help businesses connect with customers across digital channels. They enable a high level of automation, which streamlines processes, boosts agent productivity, and reduces costs.
What are the benefits of contact center digital transformation?
In an era when pretty much everything is becoming digitized or “smart”, implementing a digital contact center is more than just a logical next step. By embarking on digital contact center modernization you can:
- Enhance customer experience
- Maximize efficiency
- Boost agent morale
- Reduce costs
- Increase scalability
- Improve security
Enhance customer experience
To offer the best customer experience, you need to provide omnichannel customer service. Digital transformation makes this possible because the best software integrates all channels into one app, so agents don’t need to toggle between digital technologies.
Data from these channels is also stored in one place, giving you access to metrics and customer insights in order to offer personalized experiences. Data analytics are a big part of the process, and we’ll learn more about that later.
Maximize efficiency
Digital technology improves productivity in many ways, with streamlining and process automation making the whole system more efficient. Even setting up a cloud-based contact center only requires a few clicks, as the heavy lifting is done by the service provider.
Agents can work more efficiently when handling digital interactions. Voice interactions can only be handled one at a time, since they require their full attention. Digital interactions are asynchronous, so agents can often handle SMS messages, live chat, and emails simultaneously.
Boost agent morale
As well as the CX transformation, going digital also improves employee experiences. Because automation eliminates tedious tasks and reduces call volume, the contact center environment is less stressful. Happy agents will perform better and be more productive—and with full training, they will develop new skills.
Reduce costs
Another benefit of digital contact centers is that they don’t require a lot of physical space and hardware, as everything’s based in the cloud. Agents can work from anywhere, with full access to all the tools they require, allowing you to run a truly global contact center. And thanks to automated responses, it’s not necessary to have human agents on duty 24/7. All of that adds up to potentially significant cost savings, as well as contributing to other areas of benefit.
As well as helping you save money on premises and personnel, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model means your company acts as a subscriber and only pays for what it uses. Plus, you also have the opportunity to try out new tools and functions before making a full commitment.
Increase scalability
Digital contact center systems are easily scalable, too. With a cloud solution like RingCentral RingCX, you can add or reduce the number of agents whenever you need to—without having to buy additional software licenses, servers, or storage. That means you get not only the scalability you need but also the flexibility to adapt to ever-changing customer demand.
Improve security
Although some people are wary of trusting customers’ personal details to a remote system, cloud-hosted solutions can actually be impressively secure. Industry-leading digital contact center platform providers like RingCentral offer maximum reliability, and build solutions with an absolute focus on security and compliance.
How do digital contact center solutions work?
Now let’s look at some of the key functions of a digital contact center platform, and how they work:
Automation
Automation is a major part of your contact center digital transformation, and helps to simplify basic and complex processes. One of the most common automations is IVR (Interactive Voice Response), a self-service system that uses speech analytics to recognize common queries and provide an automated response.
Intelligent Virtual Agents (advanced chatbots) work in much the same way, by recognizing keywords and automatically sending relevant answers and information. Either way, this form of automation saves time and improves productivity by freeing up agents for more complex customer interactions.
When a customer does need to discuss the issue with an agent, automated resolution protocols can also increase customer satisfaction by solving the problem first-time. Digital technology prioritizes inbound queries and routes them to the most suitable agent.
Rapid, personalized service is made easier if agents have access to a knowledge base, encompassing commonly-experienced problems and product details—plus information about previous purchases, billing history, and preferences.
Better still is if an AI Assistant can leverage that knowledge base on an agent’s behalf, and provide them with instant information and insights. That’s what you can get with RingCX, and puts accurate answers at an agent’s fingertips to improve customer experience and boost first contact resolution rates.
Automation also means that responses can be sent out at any time, from anywhere, across your contact center digital channels. Even if it’s just a message to say the query’s been received and the waiting time is X minutes, the customer feels like they haven’t been forgotten.
Analytics
Customer analytics is another key component in digital contact center services. As well as helping you measure the success of your customer care, analyzing readily-accessible customer data gives you insights into preferences and behaviors.
This knowledge management enables contact centers to match a particular agent to a customer, based on that agent’s specific skills, increasing the likelihood of first-call resolution. Contact centers can also use analytics to work out why a call was made, based on customer personas.
When these behaviors are analyzed, contact centers can be proactive in choosing the optimum channel for communication. They may even be able to predict who is likely to experience an issue in future, and prevent customers having to call in the first place.
RingCentral RingCX gives you access to real-time contact center analytics to give you an instant insight into both customer experience and agent performance. In the future, too, analytics to aid contact center agents in delivering top-class CX could go one step further.
If your products contain Internet of Things (IoT) technology, for instance, you can harvest data from them and gain a better understanding of the way they are used. For example, a utilities provider could gather data from smart metering and use it to spot potentially dangerous anomalies. Contact center agents could then reach out proactively to customers to provide timely assistance.
Customer engagement
Customer engagement means the customer feels a connection to your company, and engaged customers are the ones who spend money, remain loyal, and share their experiences with others. It is, therefore, another crucial element of what the right digital contact center solution can offer your business.
We’ve already talked about analyzing customer data, but it’s also worth asking for personal feedback. For example, with RingCentral you can send out surveys to make customers feel their opinion really matters.
Apart from complaint-handling and technical support, digital contact centers’ operations include plenty of other avenues for engaging customers. A customer may call to discuss billing, or a contact center agent may initiate a custom call to offer a loyalty reward.
Omnichannel communication means you can get in touch to offer marketing promotions, which may be better received asynchronously than with an out-of-the-blue phone call. And customers appreciate visibility of the supply chain, such as tracking a parcel or a service upgrade.
Using multiple channels and analyzing preferences also brings more opportunities for personalization, which is crucial to customer engagement. Even in the digitized customer experience, the “human” touch has never been more important—even if it’s a bot that’s sending the custom messages!
What do I need from a digital contact center?
- Fast communication
- Productivity tools
- Robust analytics
- Seamless integrations
- Reliability and security
For your contact center to perform well in the digital business era, you’re going to need a robust yet flexible infrastructure for fast responses across all touchpoints. So, when you make the decision to adopt a digital contact center strategy, it’s worth doing things properly.
Some companies attempt to create a digital system by retrofitting a traditional call center,but if you do this, it’s more difficult to add new channels, much less integrate them seamlessly. You’ll end up with unhappy agents using clunky technology and failing to communicate effectively.
Basically, a digital customer contact center should be completely based in the cloud, with the services delivered by an expert provider who can take you from basic automation to complete contact center transformation.
Platforms such as RingCentral RingCX have all the tools your team requires to build great customer relationships. Digital contact center software should empower you to offer excellent service from anywhere, anytime, on any channel.
You’ll need skills-based and AI routing, and a knowledge base of customer information, to enable agents to resolve issues quickly. RingCX also features call deflection to reduce waiting, plus an automated IVR system and resource center for DIY solutions.
There’s a suite of workforce management tools, so contact center managers can optimize agent schedules and track progress with voice and screen recordings and supervisory tools. RingCentral’s digital contact center software also includes gamification tools, plus it integrates and works seamlessly with RingEX—a unified platform for your internal communications.
Comprehensive analytics are the best way to determine whether your system is working effectively, and RingCentral gives you easy access to ready made reports, visualizations, and customer surveys, as well as the ability to create your own.
RingCX also integrates with other business apps, including customer relationship management (CRM) software, productivity suites, project management platforms, and more.
We’ve already discussed the top-notch security and reliability of the best cloud-hosted solutions. RingCentral provides powerful encryption, enterprise-class data centers, disaster recovery, and guaranteed 99.99% uptime. Knowing your data is secure will improve your investor relations as well as customer success.
Is it time for a digital contact center?
It’s up to you, of course, but we think it’s a definite yes! Customers are more and more confident with new technology, so turn that to your advantage and use the latest innovations to improve your customer service.
Get your team together and come up with a digital strategy that will make life easier for customers and employees alike, and then choose a cloud provider (such as RingCentral) to help you deliver it. Once your contact center has been digitally transformed, you’ll speed up communication, improve productivity, and increase customer loyalty.