3 min read
These days, all roads lead to customer experience (CX).
When the end user has a bad time, the modern Internet offers them a thousand alternatives. Competitors are all too happy to help people switch over. Automations and AI make spotting upset consumers easy.
It has never been so easy to lose a customer—hence the rapidly growing focus on CX. If you can build trust with consistently good CX, small errors and mistakes are forgivable (provided you fix them). But if you struggle with maintaining CX, or try to get by with subpar CX, well… it doesn’t take much to lure your users away.
A strong tech infrastructure is absolutely essential to providing the kind of CX that is expected in this technologically rich world. It needs to be agile, secure, scalable, and smart. However, too many organizations have waited far too long to invest in the upgrades needed to meet modern customer demands.
The excuses range:
- We didn’t think the Internet would grow so rapidly
- No one planned for this five years ago
- It was cheaper in the short term to keep our old systems
- No one wanted to manage the headache of migrating
- Our decision makers are living in the past
- Our IT team isn’t big enough to handle it
Contact centers and the organizations that use them were among the first to really feel the effects of ‘waiting too long’ to upgrade. After all, contact centers are the nexus between a large company and its customers. The pain of falling behind in CX shows up fast and expensively in this world.
Common contact center CX challenges
- Queue treatments are not dynamic. “Dumb” tech uses basic algorithms to handle volume, routing simply to ‘the next available agent’ without considering matching up the issues with the right experience, without considering the customer’s history or loyalty, without considering the agent’s current fatigue or readiness.
- Contact context data not accessible, leading to additional transfers. It’s a classic run-around that most people have experienced: spend 10 minutes on hold, then 5 minutes explaining your issue, only to be transferred to start the process all over again. Everyone hates this, including the poor agents who have to embarrassingly ask a frustrated customer to re-explain.
- Data is sometimes inconsistent and incorrect, increasing handle time. Manual inputs or poorly integrated systems lead to more mistakes and omissions. Agents need to work harder and longer to get the facts straight, or simply risk getting it wrong (which causes even more issues down the road).
Solving CX like these requires a strong and up-to-date tech foundation. And you can’t expect to do it in a vacuum: perfecting your system isn’t enough when you’re also required to interface with other stakeholders’ systems as well.
The modern approach to developing this foundation is to run a contact center on a secure, public cloud infrastructure.
On-premise vs private cloud vs public cloud
On-premise means the technology is literally on site—physical servers in the building do the work. This is the oldest and riskiest system which many organizations still cling to (see ‘excuses’ above). It is hard to upgrade, does not ‘talk’ to other systems easily or at all, and is full of inefficient and “dumb” programming that cannot be tweaked without specialist knowledge.
Private cloud isn’t much better. The tech is not on site, but with no way to seamlessly connect to the outside world of third-party applications and systems, private cloud systems can fall behind as fast as on-prem platforms.
The modern solution is a secure, public cloud infrastructure. The risk and maintenance burden is spread over a large network of providers. CX needs are kept up to date, as the system can install updates and upgrades in a fraction of the time required by the outdated platforms.
GTS specializes in helping empathically migrate organizations to these secure, public cloud systems, which dramatically improves both customer and employee experiences. Get in touch today!
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