Customer Experience Featured Article

How Can Hosted Solutions Improve the Customer Experience?

The demands placed on the contact center today would put the call center of yesterday into a tailspin. Customers not only want quick service, but they also want access through multiple channels, seamless experiences and instant gratification. The customer experience is no longer defined by quick service. Today it means so much more.

Interestingly enough, a recent Exony (News - Alert) post shows that while there has been rapid acceptance of Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) business applications across the global marketplace, contact centers as a whole have lagged behind in adopting this new technology. The benefits to this approach are clear where cost, flexibility and efficiency are concerned. Companies are now also finally catching on to the reality that contact center services can improve the customer experience through cost efficiency and flexibility.

But making the switch is a challenge for some organizations. For many, they made significant investments in their on-premise solutions and have a hard time justifying any type of additional cost. The shift toward cloud technology, however, is becoming a must as customer behavior is changing and the need to put the customer experience first is taking priority. To rank higher in the customer’s psyche when it comes to meeting expectations, companies have to engage on the channels customers prefer.

As a result, the contact center of today has to offer more than just a live agent on the other end of the line. Today’s experience must include multi-channel integration, smartphone support, social media engagement and seamless experiences across each of these channels. In other words, if I call the contact center with an issue and then log a check in on the situation online, the next time I contact the company, the agent should know about these transactions and the status of the issue. SaaS makes that possible without significant investments.

The contact center of yesterday was known for its approach to siloed information. Multiple third party applications operated independently of each other. While each was put in place to improve the customer experience, none could do so through integrated technologies and the contact center was left to scramble to make sense of the broken information. For the contact center that still operates this way today, the competitive environment changes the demand and they won’t be able to survive for long.

For this reason alone, companies have a need for Exony’s VIM. The powerful solution supports the consolidation of various platforms into a single infrastructure to support the customer experience. Based on Cisco’s (News - Alert) Unified Contact Center Experience, the enterprise data and control platform is not only agile, it provides business users with the high level of control they need to create the experience customers have come to expect. When combined with better functionality, cost efficiency and flexibility, this platform enables an organization to shore up their competitive advantage in way that makes them hard to touch.