In this four-part series, Matthew Clare discusses four technical mistakes companies make when building their customer experience strategies, and how your business can avoid them. In Part 3 Matthew addresses some of the technology touchpoint mistakes and oversights that businesses make.
From the Video
Hi, I'm Matt Clare, Product Manager for Mitel's Contact Center Portfolio, and today, I'm going talk to you a little bit about some of the technical mistakes that business often make when mapping out a new contact center implementation or developing their customer experience strategy. In our last videos, we looked at common mistakes around your customer and internal touchpoints. So now it's time to look at, specifically, some of the technology touchpoints and mistakes and oversights that businesses often make.
Ask any contact center or customer experience professional how many tools it takes for them to run a successful practice, and you'll hear, it's a lot. Sometimes, upwards of a dozen tools being required to deliver great customer experiences to your customers. This is usually pretty well-documented during any discovery process, as anyone who's done a contact center RFP will attest, but all too often, integrating all of these disparate touchpoints seems to be an afterthought.
With the rise of web-based, subscription-based, cloud solutions, it's imperative that businesses are thinking about these technology touchpoints, integration points, and most importantly, how they can integrate all of these various products and solutions together to deliver great customer experience. Any modern contact center tool or customer experience solution will have some sort of APIs available, many now using standardized open REST API interfaces that ease integration between different web-based solutions and services.
An open technology solution should allow businesses to seamlessly integrate their CRM, ERP, and other business productivity tools into their contact center solution. For example, using standardized REST API interfaces, businesses could look to screen pop a web-based CRM directly within a web-based agent interface to provide a more streamlined business process for agents.
The workflow an interaction follows is also really important to view from a technology perspective. A workflow could be as simple as a call arrives into an IVR system, plays a menu to the callers, caller inputs a digit press to select the support group, and the call queues to the longest idle agent. But workflows also have the ability to connect disparate systems and databases.
For example, a workflow could do a database query to a CRM system, collect that information, and read it back to a customer while they're on an IVR call. But here's where an open solution gets really important. What happens if a business wants to adopt a new emerging technology that's not supported out-of-the-box by the contact center solution? Not only does that agent interface need to be open, but the workflows must also be open. And by taking this open media approach to contact center routing, businesses can actually route any new software-based task or media through a workflow engine just as if it was a common media type to the call center, like voice, email, or web chat.
So with an open media routing solution, businesses can really ensure that they seamlessly and easily integrate new, emerging third party media. Things like WebRTC voice and video, native social media messaging applications, etc. So it's important to map out how you need to route interactions today, but also with the emerging new messaging applications popping up daily around the world now, it's even more important to ensure that your contact center will meet your needs in the future. Stay tuned for the next video that will look a little bit more at the technical mistakes that businesses make when mapping out their customer experience strategy.
