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Agility may be the defining feature of today’s contact centers.

In the past, speed was the name of the game. How could a contact center be as efficient as possible, maximizing the call volume each agent could handle and minimizing average handle time? While these factors still play a role in contact center operations, customer experience (CX) now takes center stage. That CX is fluid and omnichannel, and that means your contact center must be as agile as possible.

It’s fitting, then, that DevOps, an operational approach that grew out of the Agile software development practices of the 1990s, is finally grabbing the attention of more contact center executives. As more contact center leaders have embraced cloud technology, a nimbler and fleet-footed approach to CX development and delivery has become possible.

How the cloud clears the way for DevOps

Contact centers are rapidly shedding legacy, on-premises technology in favor of the cloud. The global market for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) offerings is expected to grow by 26.1% annually from 2022 to 2027, expanding from $17.1 billion to $54.6 billion.

While there are many reasons for this shift, it ultimately boils down to customer experience and cost management. The cloud allows contact centers to scale more efficiently, delivering more flexible and personalized CX solutions while driving down the cost of service. It enables a more seamless blend of human agents with artificial intelligence technology within an omnichannel service environment.

The cloud does more, though. It also clears the way for a DevOps approach in the contact center. Consider a few key changes that come with cloud migration:

Silos break down and communication opens up. When a contact center isn’t bound to a physical location, collaboration and communication become essential ingredients to delivering customer service.Automation becomes easier. Cloud contact center technology is built on a modern architecture making it more compatible with the small, frequent changes that are the hallmark of DevOps. Automation of key processes, from CI/CD to testing, becomes key to achieving the DevOps vision.

All these changes lay the groundwork for a fuller shift toward DevOps in the contact center. Because it is rooted in Agile software methodology, DevOps relies on the open, collaborative culture that’s inherent to an Agile approach. It’s built on breaking down the silos between development and operations so that these two departments can work together throughout the development cycle to deliver faster, better software releases.

In the contact center, it’s much easier to embrace this type of mindset shift when the overhead of legacy technology is no longer in the way. And when contact center leadership embraces this shift, it lays the groundwork for even more powerful results.

Continuous testing in DevOps: The perfect recipe for CX assurance

At the heart of the DevOps mindset is the commitment to continuous iteration and continuous development (CI/CD). Rather than separating development and testing into distinct stages, DevOps intertwines them throughout the entire lifecycle of software development.

This shift from a develop-test-release approach to a more fluid interchange between the three relies on continuous testing. Instead of isolated checks at the end of development, which often lead to major delays or misses in discovering software issues, testing “shifts left” to happen much earlier in the cycle. This enables development teams to discover problems much earlier, solve them more efficiently, and reduce the costs associated with premature deployment.

When done well, the result is a massive improvement in execution. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report by Google Cloud DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), organizations with elite DevOps teams outperform those with low-end DevOps teams by leaps and bounds. Consider a few stark comparisons:

Elite groups are 6,570 times faster at making software changes and restoring service outages.They deploy code updates 973 times more often.The changes they deploy are one-third less likely to fail.

What do these kinds of performance improvements mean for the contact center? By deploying CI/CD, automated testing, and other DevOps approaches, contact centers can reduce outages, improve voice quality, enhance chatbot performance, and more. And while it’s possible, in theory, to do this without a wholesale embrace of the DevOps mentality, making a full mindset shift will drastically enhance what’s possible for contact center CX.

Changing the mindset in your contact center

Embracing a DevOps approach in your contact center requires a change in mindset. You can no longer think of development and upgrades to your system as separate from CX — they must become an integral part of it. At Cyara, we call it “DevCXOps.”

Our CX assurance platform helps the world’s most prestigious brands accelerate the shift toward DevOps because the entire system is built on CI/CD. Through powerful automation, our customers deploy functional, regression, and performance tests, along with live CX monitoring, to gain a comprehensive view of the customer experience.

This kind of automated continuous testing and monitoring allows development and operations teams to ensure that CX software — whether an existing version or a new update — performs at optimal levels. Instead of catching service issues in scattershot fashion or after they’ve already impacted CX, Cyara helps catch them proactively so they don’t become serious problems.

One of our customers, a major Canadian bank, uses Cyara to get a unified picture of its contact center operations and an end-to-end view of the customer journey that allows them to catch issues in real-time and resolve them more quickly.

That’s only one example — countless more contact centers have used Cyara to jumpstart their shift to a DevOps way of doing business. If you’re ready to deploy DevOps in your contact center, you don’t have to do it alone. Take a look at this whitepaper  to learn more about how Cyara can help.

Digital Transformation

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Contact centers don’t look like they did 10 years ago. Technology has fundamentally changed the way they do business.

Alongside that transformation has come steady growth. In 2022, 80% of contact centers planned to expand their workforces, with half of those expecting to create entirely new roles. Only 1% planned to cut staff. Yet, as they grow, they must find new ways to scale effectively. An expanded contact center brings a more expansive technology stack, and it becomes more important than ever to assure that stack is up to the task.

Most contact center leaders would agree that investing in new technology can help contact centers maximize growth and drive future success. Still, they’re left with an important question: What technology should they invest in? With so many solutions available on the market, the true challenge is choosing the ones that will deliver the greatest return.

Toward the flawless CX of the future

Imagine what the customer experience (CX) could look like in the near future. A customer may start their support journey on a brand’s website, interacting via chat. They then seamlessly send the conversation to their smartphone to continue on the go. After they resolve their most pressing questions with the chatbot, they request a call from support for a more complicated issue. 

Ten minutes later, an agent calls them, fully prepared with all the information from the chatbot session. Unbeknownst to the customer, that agent receives live insights during the call, with AI directing them based on the tone and content of the conversation. This allows for a smooth, frustration-free call. Later, the system generates an automatic email follow-up with personalized tips for the customer and the option to reconnect with an agent. There were no award menus and no hold times — just seamless customer service.

Many of the pieces required to deliver this level of CX already exist. Yet, in 2019, Freshworks reported that sales and service agents in the U.S. wasted 516 million hours a year trying to use their contact center’s software. Customers, for their part, have mixed feelings about their experiences with AI — 61% of them still dislike IVR. 

The possibility for flawless CX is there, but contact centers haven’t quite cracked the code.

4 technology solutions every contact center needs

Where should contact centers direct their resources, then? There are five types of technology they can’t afford to ignore.

Omnichannel communication: Given how we communicate today, many people feel less tied to a single way to connect with brands. We move seamlessly between social media, text messages, emails, and voice communication, so we expect the same from businesses.

This is true whether it comes to sales or service. Seventy-three percent of consumers prefer shopping across multiple channels, and 80% want brands to communicate easily across these channels. When brands make these options available, customers are happier and spend more. 

One of Cyara’s customers does this exceptionally well and points to what a truly fluid CX can look like in the modern call center. Agero delivers premium roadside assistance through intuitive, omnichannel service. Customers — who may be in life-or-death situations — can create their own tickets via mobile or get on the IVR and receive a link to create a ticket via text. While they create the ticket, the IVR stays online to ensure everything goes smoothly. This type of CX meets customers where they are to ensure they get the service they need.

Conversational AI: According to NICE’s “2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report,” 81% of consumers want more self-service options from businesses. Today’s customers realize that many issues don’t require a long conversation with an agent, and they want the option to solve their own problems without the hassle. 

Conversational AI is the key to creating more self-service options. This technology, which powers IVR systems and chatbots, is what enables bots to have more effective interactions with customers and solve many of their simple requests. Brands that don’t utilize it are severely limited in their ability to meet customer expectations and control the costs of service.

Advanced analytics and sentiment analysis: Today’s contact center managers have an enormous amount of data at their fingertips. Many already have the tools to automatically collect information about every call and every customer interaction. Few actually put that data to use. 

With the capabilities added by AI, it’s possible to quickly and deeply analyze troves of customer data. For instance, contact centers can map and analyze keywords from call logs to assess their relationship with customer satisfaction and handle times. Or they can examine trends in how individual agents handle calls, allowing for more productive coaching. At the most advanced level, contact centers can deploy sentiment analysis technology to capture a live view of a customer-agent interaction and provide real-time direction. 

Together, these advanced analytics enable a more flexible, nimble form of customer service.

Quality assurance: None of the above technology investments can be fully realized without a simultaneous investment in quality assurance (QA). Just as you wouldn’t add on to your house without increasing your insurance coverage, you shouldn’t grow your contact center without investing in a way to ensure your technology truly allows customers to get the help they need, regardless of which channel they use.

It doesn’t matter how advanced a contact center’s AI and analytics are if it can’t execute a consistently great customer experience. Whether it’s problems with voice quality or downtime, the end result is bad for customer satisfaction and the bottom line. The technology that Cyara offers enables comprehensive call center QA to serve as an expanded insurance policy for an expanding contact center.

QA requires continuous testing and monitoring across every CX channel and throughout the entire software development cycle. On its own, this would be a massive undertaking for any contact center. That’s why Cyara’s suite of products is designed to automate this process and enable contact center managers to catch and correct glitches before they become CX problems.

Agero’s exceptional CX delivery wouldn’t be possible without a robust, automated QA program. Especially since the company deals with customers in life-threatening situations, service must be fast and flawless. With automated continuous testing from Cyara, Agero can regularly monitor its IVR and text and web service portals to ensure they’re performing well. Thanks to IVR monitoring, for instance, Agero deflects 25–30% of its calls and creates a smoother, better CX. In a sense, Cyara has become Agero’s insurance policy for flawless CX.

By automating the QA process like Agero, contact centers can assure high-quality CX without their QA costs running wild.

Invest wisely in your technology solutions

Contact centers that succeed in the years ahead while have scaled their business while delivering an increasingly flawless CX. There are countless options for where to invest your resources to make this happen, but no tools are more important than these five. Start here, and you’ll build a strong foundation for delivering flawless CX at scale.

Ready to invest in automated testing and CX assurance for your tech stack? Try a Cyara demo today.

Digital Transformation

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There’s an old saying when something you value changes and no longer brings you the joy the way it used to, “it’s not like it used to be.” For those who remember the good old days, great service was an essential part of the customer experience. Nowadays, customer service is not what it used to be. For decades now, customer service has become a necessary cost center. The emphasis on scale, automation, speed, and margins have also come at the cost of customer experience. However, new research now shows that the role of service is shifting back to “service,” to unify the customer’s experience.  

Since the dawn of the contact center in the 1960s, customer service evolved into a transactional entity. Over the years, executives learned to think of service as a numbers game, cycling customers on and off the phone and closing-out tickets as fast as possible, regardless of whether or not customers had a positive impression of the company in each interaction. That mindset would serve as models for deploying next-gen technologies, including IVRs, knowledge centers, chatbots, automation/RPA, text/messaging, with each designed to scale transactional engagement vs. delivering the level of service customers hope to receive. 

Customer experience reflects all customer engagements; Service can no longer serve as the weakest link 

The customer experience — the sum of all engagements, beyond customer service, a customer has with a business — is core to business success today. A related study of customers and B2B buyers published by Salesforce, the “State of the Connected Customer,” showed that nearly nine-in-ten respondents consider experience to be as critical as the product, itself, in deciding whether or not to buy from a company. This means that the experience you deliver is also a product.  

Nearly all respondents to that survey said a positive service experience makes them more likely to make a repeat purchase (94%). The same study also found that 71% of customers had switched brands in the last year with 48% switching companies for better customer service. These are critical insights especially in the current economic environment, when budgets are tightening, and loyalty becomes more important to the bottom line.  

Every facet of that experience must contribute to the great whole of the brand experience you promise. If customer service is viewed as a cost center and metrics prioritize speed over quality and transactions over relationship, it will always take away from the customer’s experience instead of enhancing it.  

There’s good news to report for service professionals. In its fifth edition of the “State of Service,” Salesforce found that companies are increasing investments in employees and technology budgets to match case volume and customer expectations. Over half of service organizations (55%) report increased budgets — up from 32% in 2020. And 51% report increased headcount — up from 19% in 2020. 

Mindset: The value of service shines when it’s meant to enhance the customer experience 

As customers become increasingly connected and empowered, their expectations soar. Service as a cost center is no longer a viable strategy to stand out against competitors where everything either takes away from or adds to the experience. It comes down to a shift in mindset, from a cost center mentality to a revenue generator. When executives invest in customer services that enhances their experience, customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and stay loyal.  

That truth is increasingly penetrating the hallowed walls of C-Suites and the boardroom.  

More than 50% of respondents in Salesforce’s survey of customer service professionals say their management now views their department as a revenue generator, rather than the cost center it may have perceived to be. That’s a significant tipping point that makes service performance all the more important not just for companies as a whole, but for the people in charge of delivering customer service. 

If you need more proof of this phenomenon, consider that over one-third of customer service leaders are now in the C-level — an unprecedented level of representation at the highest reaches of business structures.  

The fact that these are sourced from customer service ranks speaks volumes. And there’s appetite for this trend to continue. Nearly nine-in-ten of customer service respondents who don’t have C-level representation see its value. 

With the rise of roles such as chief customer officers and chief experience officers, service becomes one, albeit critical, part of the overall customer experience. It no longer has to represent the weakest link in the customer journey. 

Connection is the heart of service 

Driving customer success starts with connection to engage customers to meet and eventually exceed customer expectations. 

Think about the myriad of touchpoints that proliferate the path to purchase — and repurchase and loyalty — today. We often talk about this in terms of striving for omnichannel engagement. But beyond business buzzwords, a customer would never use the word omnichannel, it’s important to humanize the customer experience by considering the different, disconnected, departments that touch the customer journey. For example… 

Are service agents aware of marketing campaigns a given customer has received when they make contact? Do they have an informed sense of how a customer has navigated the company’s e-commerce touchpoints? Is the customer’s historical experience, preferences, previous purchases, available to service agents and all frontline executives responsible for customer engagement through their journey? Is integrated data and insights available to power AI in ways that present next best actions and experiences at a personal level, whether that’s an agent, chatbot, or self-guided path? If in a B2B company, are they aware of salesperson interactions?  

This is all critical context that service reps need to meet elevated customer expectations for efficient, tailored engagement. 

So, have companies met those customer expectations for connected engagement? According to the “State of the Connected Customer” survey, they have not.  

Three-in-five respondents say they generally feel like they are interacting with different departments rather than one company. And unfortunately, two-thirds say they often need to repeat information to different agents. When nearly all customers say a positive service experience makes them more likely to make a repeat purchase, is this status quo serving service’s elevated business mandate? 

This attests to a cost-center vs. growth mindset. In each case, the outcomes are very different. 

Compare high-performing service teams — those with the highest customer satisfaction levels — and their underperforming peers. The top teams are empowered to treat unique customers with unique engagement, think freedom from restrictive policies that don’t put all customer situations into a single category of service. Top teams are also more empowered with contextual information that details a customer’s entire journey, whether with service, or another team.  

In these cases, over three-fifths of service teams now share the same CRM software with their colleagues in other departments like ecommerce, sales, and marketing.  

Context matters in a digital-first world 

Let’s talk about the other critical element of meeting elevated customer expectations: digital channels and, more importantly, customer context. 

Even though the world is opening up, the use of digital channels, such as social media and customer portals, have not backtracked. In fact, customers say they are likely to spend more time online than before 2020. This is leading to the adoption of more digital-first touchpoints. Nearly three-in-five customers now prefer to engage through digital channels.  

Before you ask, yes, that preference skews higher among younger demographics. But still, channels such as phone and email are dropping, and digital-first touchpoints are rising across the board.  

Responses to this trend are represented in the increasing adoption among service organizations of channels like mobile apps, forums, and especially video. But a wholesale shift to digital channels ignores critical nuance…context. 

Key objectives are shifting to reflect a focus on efficiency, cost savings, and doing more with less 

Customers veer towards different channels depending on the circumstances. For instance, 59% of customers prefer self-service tools for simple issues while 81% of service professionals say the phone is a preferred channel for complex issues — up from 76% in 2020.  

Wherever they go, customers want their interaction to be easy, seamless, and fast. Let’s focus for a moment on the preference for self-service for simple issues. This is a great example of where customer and company priorities meet — in this case, in the pursuit of efficiency. 

Customer success excellence in today’s environment isn’t easy. Salesforce research found that 83% of customers expect to interact with someone immediately, and 83% expect to resolve complex problems through one person.  

Service professionals are feeling the pressure too, with 60% recognizing the increase in customer expectations since before the pandemic. 

Shifting KPIs reflect a focus on efficiency 

The preference for self-service for simple matters coincides with a heightened focus on efficiency for companies facing uncertain economic conditions. 

Organizations are being asked to do more with less and reduce costs. This is reflected in the rise of efficiency-related service KPIs, such as case deflection, customer effort, and first contact resolution.  

While self-service is a great foray into this pursuit, it can only go so far. How else can service organizations maximize customer satisfaction while using resources most efficiently? 

The answer lies at least in part in technology. Specifically, nearly three-fifths of service organizations now use at least one form of workflow or process automation — freeing up agents to focus on the higher value, more complex work that customers with more pressing or unique needs demand in exchange for repeat purchases.  

Users of automation reported significant benefits, such as time savings, better customer focus, and fewer errors in addressing customer needs. 

Three takeaways to transform service into a growth (and customer relationship) engine  

Service plays an important role in delivering a connected, efficient, and product customer experience. More importantly, service itself is shifting from a necessary cost center to a strategic growth engine. 

Service organizations are now at the forefront of strategic shifts across industries. Leaders are investing in continued momentum as well as future disruptions as customer expectations only continue to increase. 

1) Shift from a service mindset to an experience mindset 

Customers don’t see a “service department” — they see one company. As elevated, connected experiences become more commonplace, any instance of a disconnected, siloed experience across sales, service, marketing, and beyond will stand out and prompt customers to seek out better alternatives. Connecting service people, processes, and technology with their cross-functional counterparts helps mitigate this risk and elevate the overall customer experience. 

2) Empower employees as much as customers 

Scaling digital engagement offerings for customers has its merits, but we need to also think about what capabilities employees need to engage across these channels and provide the tailored, empathetic, and contextualized service customers deserve. Technology is a big part of this equation. But all the technology in the world won’t make much of a difference without the evolved policies and processes that transformation requires. 

3) Audit metrics for efficiency, scale, and experience 

Tried-and-true service metrics aren’t going anywhere, but a narrow focus on closing out as many tickets with as few agents as possible is a recipe for CX and service failure. Think about how KPIs can help identify areas of improvement as you scale across new channels, for instance. As resources get scarcer among economic uncertainty, look for ways to do more with less, without compromising the experiences customers have and take away from each engagement. 

Business Services

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Your contact center serves as a key gateway through which customers interact with your brand, so you want to ensure that each customer’s interaction is smooth, fast, and informative. They should not only achieve their desired outcomes but have a positive experience along the way – one that makes them want to come back. 

That’s why businesses are finding more and more ways to apply AI in their customer experience planning. They love the many ways it can help them architect the desired experience for customers and employees and achieving and competitive edge… all while creating game-changing efficiencies.

Let’s look at a few examples.

AI reduces contact center costs and complexities while increasing efficiencies  

Chatbots and Natural Language Processing, or NLP, are driving billions in annual customer support cost savings. AI capabilities such as screen pops and real-time transcription shave off seconds from every customer interaction that collectively save millions of dollars while increasing first call resolution (FCR) and reducing handle time. AI-powered virtual agents and call deflection further reduce costs and keep call queues lighter for customers who need to speak with someone quickly. AI can even auto populate the notes section of your CRM to speed after-call work for agents. AI takes what’s complicated and makes it simple, with a proven ability to reduce costs over the long term.

AI gives customers what they want most for a superior service experience

AI supports effortless interactions with a personalized touch that keeps customers coming back, from front-end solutions like conversational AI and call deflection to back-end applications that customers have no idea are working behind the scenes to elevate their experience. For example, real-time transcription via speech-to-text that enables agents to know exactly what the customer is saying the first time, every time or identity-centered security that lets customers skip repetitive verification questions without compromising security or compliance. When done right, AI makes communication more effortless and drives more personalized engagement for long-term loyalty.      

AI helps you expand your pool of talent and create “super agents” 

Work is no longer somewhere that you go, it’s something that you do. A coffee shop, a co-working space, or a dining room table easily qualify as suitable agent workspaces in a post-COVID world. AI delivers next-level training and coaching that can be done from anywhere, so your company can cast a wider net and hire top-tier talent while creating an environment where agents know they can be successful. 

Toolwire, a member of Avaya’s Experience Builders ecosystem, crafted Spaces Learning, an AI-powered learning and development solution that offers learners more timely access to relevant, focused training and skill-building materials through both self-paced on-demand and real-time collaborative learning options. The platform features a carousel of micro-learning-oriented course content, sandboxed training environments for hands-on access, assessments, and AI-based insights on how employees, both in and outside of the contact center, are retaining and expanding their skillsets to better serve customers across the entire organization.  

AI in your contact center with Avaya

AI solves for so many challenges in the contact center related to employee retention, customer expectations, and the explosion of the surface area where customers and employees interact. Here’s how Avaya brings contact center AI to life:

 We have a rich ecosystem of AI partners like Google and Journey, a digital identity verification and authentication platform provider, who strengthen the value of the Avaya solutions we deliver to our customers. For example, in healthcare, a provider can use Avaya OneCloud to simplify routine interactions like appointment and bill pay reminders by securely sending notifications across the channel of a patient’s choice, with patients being able to make payments directly from those notifications with high veracity authentication via Journey. This delivers the kind of experience the patient wants (easy and frictionless) while improving identity verification, decreasing false acceptance ratio and costs associated with fraud.Avaya OneCloud – our composable, cloud 3.0-enabled experience platform – includes our award-winning Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, which speeds the creation and delivery of new processes and experiences, even for very narrow use cases. You can customize or make things easier by leveraging our pre-built apps (ex: Avaya Virtual Agent). You have full control over how you bring AI to life within your contact center.  Not ready to go off-prem? You can ease into the cloud with hybrid solutions, keeping core services in your data centers while augmenting them and infusing cloud-based AI innovations. You’ll get all the disruptive benefits of AI without the requirement of a disruptive platform shift. One of our customers delivering outsourcing programs for some of the largest companies in the country chose a hybrid solution with Avaya OneCloud. Combined with meetings and collaboration from the cloud within the Avaya Spaces browser experience, this all-in-one solution provides everything in one convenient place for the customer, as it replaced multiple systems previously used throughout the company, saving them over $1M.The Avaya Media Processing Core delivers faster AI innovation that creates the kind of competitive experiences I walked through earlier (ex: AI transcription). 

Customers and agents are beyond tired of experiences that underwhelm and frustrate. Aren’t you? The contact center is the single most impactful place an organization can implement AI. I can tell you from firsthand experience working with our customers, your customers, agents, and your entire business will love the results. 

See what you can start doing in your contact center today. Find out more here. 

Data Center

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The contact center has traditionally operated through on-premises servers and software, but shifting it to the cloud can help CIOs improve the customer journey. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) options now give enterprises more confidence that they can better deliver high-quality customer experiences.

However, there are potential challenges around moving contact center services, especially if the business has spent years cultivating good relationships with its customers. For many organizations, even a 1% drop in the performance of an Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) system can result in a surge of support calls for live agents, who are already under enormous pressure due to workforce shortages.

Here are the top three factors to consider before migrating your contact center to the cloud:

Avoid a rush to the cloud: Contact center software that has been optimized over the years cannot simply be rewritten and moved to a new CCaaS platform. Specific and careful planning must take place to keep optimizations intact and avoid breaking the customer experience. For example, many systems have carefully constructed call flows, routing rules, and natural language libraries featuring customer terminology. Those were refined over time and can’t be immediately replicated in a new system from day one.
Ensure portability to avoid vendor lock-in: Several CCaaS providers offer services that utilize a specific cloud host, making them inflexible. Any cost savings from moving contact center software to the cloud could be negated if an enterprise decides to change cloud providers due to market or technology changes, mergers, or other events. Choosing the right CCaaS provider means looking for options that are cloud-agnostic, as well as nimble enough to move should the need arise.
Enable AI systems that can handle demand spikes or other changes: New technologies that integrate natural language processing and machine learning algorithms can provide flexibility for companies experiencing an influx of new customer interactions. AI software that can learn with each customer engagement helps to ensure that the system recognizes the optimal action for the next customer who inquires about a new topic. For example, early in the pandemic, banking institutions needed to add messages about lobby closures and longer hold times, but many companies began receiving inquiries about stimulus check status that the system couldn’t quickly answer. A solution that can recognize new questions from customers and quickly react with answers is one of the benefits of an AI system that is constantly learning.

Careful planning combined with a strategy that continually prioritizes the customer experience will enable enterprises to achieve a smooth, optimized, and efficient transition to the cloud. IT leaders should partner with well-established experts to guarantee the best experience in that transformation.

To learn more about open, extensible, and collaborative contact center solutions, explore the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform powered with Nuance AI, Teams, and Dynamics 365, here.

Cloud Management

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All-inclusive vacations. Personalized tours. Packed sports arenas. These are the kinds of experiences that engage us, excite us, and leave us feeling satisfied. CXOs, CIOs, and others entrusted with and empowered to make CX decisions should want the experiences that flow in and out of their contact centers to be just as engaging. They should be pleasantly surprised by their communication options. Customers should be floored by how easy it is to get things done with self-service tools such as a virtual agent. They should be excited that they didn’t have to answer the same repetitive security questions. So excited, that they’re willing to engage more deeply with a business and tell their friends and family about it. 

Today’s contact centers are no longer transactional in nature. Customer experience leaders should be actively working to build an experience-driven contact center. Here’s what to consider…

Building an experience-driven contact center requires experience thinking. 

Experience thinking means placing experiences at the heart of all changes to operations by focusing on the core of human interaction. By doing this, companies can consistently give customers what they need, many times, before they think to ask for it. This is crucial in today’s age of the Everything Customer. Coined by Gartner, the Everything Customer represents a customer who wants every mode of engagement at their fingertips for getting the help or answers they need. Customers should be able to use whatever channel or touchpoint works best for them in the moment, which can change at any time depending on the need or circumstance. 

One day self-service might make sense. The next day, in-person at a physical location. Even in a physical store, there are many ways customers can engage, connect, and be serviced. Businesses can’t presume to know how a customer will reach out, but they should be prepared to deliver a seamless, effortless, and personalized experience every time and in line with their desired outcome. 

To compete on experience thinking, companies need an Experience Platform. 

Many companies try to do the right thing by using technology to meet customer demands only to move farther from them. That’s because they are using monolithic, generic apps that don’t enable them to deliver personalized experiences. What businesses need is an Experience Platform that is open, flexible, and composable in nature, allowing them to build their own experiences as well as leverage “pre-built” experiences that can be quickly tailored to fit their customer and business needs. In essence, the cloud becomes a toolkit for digital transformation instead of a destination to migrate to. 

Let’s say you work from home (cheers to remote work!) and need a latte from your local coffee shop to get through the day. You open a food delivery app on your phone to place your order, but notice the shop is out of your favorite drink. At this point you’re able to tap on an icon at the bottom of your screen and chat with a bot in real-time to confirm if it’s the topping that’s unavailable and, if so, what options you do have. You’re surprised by how easy it is to talk with the bot. The conversation is natural, seamless, and humanlike. You learn which toppings are available and finish placing your order. This is a simple example of experience thinking in contact center design. The customer is empowered with the information they need, with a fantastic experience, and the coffee shop doesn’t have to use costly in-person resources. 

The kinds of things an Experience Platform can do in minutes is more than a typical company could develop and enable in months. In the example above, in which the food delivery company offered a virtual agent through its mobile app, the company could build its own from scratch or deploy a cloud-based, pre-built virtual agent that can be customized and scaled to deliver seamless transactions in a matter of minutes. The Avaya OneCloud™ Experience Platform enables this kind of innovation and can also connect users with our Experience Builders community to provide access to all the technical expertise, skills, and resources they need to develop incredible experiences for their customers and employees. 

An Experience Platform also supports a vendor ecosystem, giving businesses instant access to a pool of innovative, readily available solutions from industry-leading vendors. Gartner predicts that by 2025, the average organization will be exploiting the benefits of this ecosystem approach to create better customer and employee experiences. 

Let’s say you’re a healthcare or financial organization that’s heavily reliant on identity and data security. Every time a customer reaches out to pay a bill, manage their account, or make an appointment, they must answer frustrating security questions often related to their personally identifiable information. Avaya OneCloud supports Identity-centered security and biometrics by Journey as part of its Experience Builder ecosystem. Patients and users can verify their identity through the use of biometrics to simplify the authentication process with higher veracity, reducing costs by as much as $3 per call while improving the customer experience. Avaya OneCloud enables effortless transfers across all physical and digital channels (ex: chatbot to agent), and Journey carries this authentication forward so the service experience continues without missing a beat. There’s no need for patients or users to reauthenticate themself every time they speak with someone new. This is a notable example of experience thinking in the contact center. 

An experience-driven contact center gives your customers what they want and what you want for your business.

An Experience Platform provides everything businesses need to create an experience-driven contact center that thrills and satisfies. Tools and building blocks to build their own experiences, pre-built apps to deliver value more immediately, a global community of experts for support as needed, and a growing Experience Builder ecosystem to further simplify, enhance, and differentiate experiences. It’s a powerful piece of technology that takes what’s complicated and makes it simple so that businesses can focus on experiences and outcomes. 

Learn more about Avaya OneCloud and Avaya Experience Builders. 

Artificial Intelligence

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The pace of business is accelerating. Enterprises today require the robust networks and infrastructure required to effectively manage and protect an ever-increasing volume of data. They must also deliver the speed and low-latency great customer experiences require in an era marked by dramatic innovations in edge computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, unified communications, and other singular computing trends now synonymous with business success.

We recently caught up with Mike Fuhrman, Chief Product and Information Officer at Flexential, to learn how the company is helping customers gain the connectivity and cloud solutions they need and what it means to be VMware Cloud Verified. We also took the opportunity to learn what he sees as the next big transformative trends in cloud computing.

“We serve companies in numerous industries, including those in software and IT services, manufacturing, finance, insurance, retail, health care, transportation, media and Internet, and telecommunications,” says Fuhrman. “The kinds of organizations that benefit most from our unique approach are those that require a seamless and integrated solution, low-latency connectivity across North America and beyond—and access to an all-inclusive solution from a single vendor so they can offload as much or as little of the IT management burden as they want. Organizations also turn to us for access to an extensive bench of professional services and IT experts who can assist in everything from strategy and design to implementation, ongoing management and optimization regardless of how their businesses scale.” 

Flexential’s 40 state-of-the-art data centers in North America – located in metropolitan areas across the country to ensure short hops and low latency – are connected by a 100 Gbps network backbone that is easily upgradable to 400 Gbps for those customers that require ultra-high speeds. Notably, the company offers cloud solutions with built-in security and compliance to the hypervisor for the peace of mind that results when infrastructure is audit-ready at all times. Industry-leading SLAs also guarantee that applications and the data within and used by them – the very lifeblood of the enterprise – is always accessible and protected.

The company’s unified cloud platform, FlexAnywhere™, integrates colocation, cloud, edge, connectivity, data protection, and the managed and professional services to deliver a true hybrid IT approach. Flexential also offers two types of private clouds, a hosted private cloud with dedicated resources for compute, networking and storage; and Advanced Access, a hosted private cloud offering that enables enterprises to maintain control of the provider-owned VMware vCenter server. An industry-first, it allows for greater personalization in a virtual environment that performs and functions like an on-premise solution.

Flexential also provides a managed public cloud service that lets customers use AWS and Azure, through a managed, consumption-based model that ensures they only pay for the public cloud services and capacity they use. And the Flexential Cloud Fabric, a Network-as-a-Service solution, makes it easy to spin-up, configure and manage all cloud connections from a single pane of glass, an innovation that makes true multi-cloud operations a reality.

The company also offers Desktop-as-a-Service, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, managed containers, as well as managed services for networking and infrastructure, security, and compliance. Addition services address each stage of the cloud journey, from design and migration to optimization.

All of the company’s cloud offerings are based on VMware technology. This includes vSphere, HCX, vROps, NSX accessed through Flexential’s FXP portal, which is tightly integrated with VMware vCloud Director.

“Being VMware Cloud Verified is important to us because it not only allows us to demonstrate Flexential delivering best-of-class solutions to our customers today, but it also contributes to an important strategic partnership that allows us to innovate and easily deliver market-leading future enhancements to our customers going forward,” adds Fuhrman. “Being VMware Cloud Verified is also important for our customers because it gives them the confidence and assurance that our cloud solutions utilize best-in-class network, storage, and compute solutions that are future-proofed and based on industry-leading technology that will continue to leverage market-leading innovations.”

Fuhrman notes that this confidence and assurance will be crucial as enterprises embrace what he sees as the next big transformative trend in cloud computing. It’s a trend he says already has significant momentum and will be increasingly commonplace in the near-term future.

“Multi-cloud deployments that enable enterprises to capitalize on the strengths of individual clouds for specific use cases, software-defined data centers, and enhancements to virtualized networks are where we will see a dramatic increase in activity,” says Fuhrman. “And that will only increase as more organizations stretch workloads across multi-cloud environments to dramatically improve customer experiences and simultaneously lowering their overall IT costs.”

Learn more about Flexential and its partnership with VMware here.

Cloud Computing, IT Leadership