How to migrate your contact centre

In an increasingly competitive environment, businesses must build leaner and more agile operations that can not only meet, but often outstrip, the fast pace of changing consumer demands. Keeping up to date with technology is nearly always the best way to start. Across all functions, more and more businesses are turning to sophisticated cloud-based solutions to optimise their services, gain added flexibility, access advanced technology, and increase operational and cost-efficiency.

Unsurprisingly, many call centres are realising the limitations of traditional systems and they’re discovering the countless advantages that switching to cloud-based platforms can bring to their call centre. Insights from Deloitte’s Global Contact Centre Survey points out that while customer experience will be a key differentiator for companies moving forward, already more than half (55%) of company executives think moving contact centre capabilities to the cloud is a sound technology strategy.

Some of the benefits of using subscription-based cloud contact centre solutions include not having to invest upfront in onsite technology development, no hardware to manage or host, eliminating maintenance or system upgrade costs, taking control by reducing reliance on IT teams, and becoming naturally scalable as demands grow. All of this happens while gaining access to the most advanced capabilities, such as Oration’s advanced machine learning speech recognition and process automation technology to enhance customer interactions.

So, how can you start leveraging the cloud to modernise your call centre – literally overnight?

Overhauling your existing call centre technology is an extremely onerous task. While it can take months to analyse and document all your existing layers, processes, and requirements, you could fall into the trap of building and implementing expensive new solutions that are still designed around outdated technology. An off-the-shelf cloud call routing solution, such as Oration by Convai, can completely change your call centre experience in a matter of hours, internally and from a customer-facing perspective. It overlays your existing system, replacing the IVR applications while seamlessly integrating with your call delivery mechanisms, and gives direction around how to interact with callers.

Now your callers are being greeted by the latest technology delivered via the cloud, your new system can use open language questioning and data collection to finely tune the caller experience independently of your base infrastructure. Essentially, this means it continually improves its understanding of why customers are calling and how to direct them to the fastest and most appropriate outcome.

In an increasingly digitised world, data is being used everywhere to enhance business processes and performance. But traditional call centre systems aren’t built in such a way that allows them to continually gather and use data to improve the customer experience. Older systems usually ask closed questions such as providing a list of options while in more advanced traditional systems they might ask open questions but can only understand a small number of utterances. Consequently, you don’t gain insight into what people really want – only how they react to the options you’ve programmed. In this instance, improving the customer experience is often only speculative and achieved through lengthy development projects, after which, customer behaviours and expectations are likely to have moved on again.

By simply asking customers what they’re calling about, a speech-driven cloud call routing solution such as Convai’s Oration gives you complete transparency around the absolute truth of what people are calling for, every single time. For example, if the system tells you that 5% of callers have a specific common query, or there is a 7.3% demand for a basic task, then managers themselves can respond immediately by configuring the system with ready-to-use and easily adaptable targeted banners or self-serve options – and these are only delivered to relevant callers.

As the design is based on what caller’s ask for, you can guarantee it will be used and that all relevant customers will access your new functionality. In the new world, it’s all about empowering managers to take real-time control of the ongoing management of the customer experience and call centre operations, without relying on IT teams.

Cloud solutions are helping to transform traditionally rigid call centre systems into a living, breathing, and changeable entity. On the cusp of a new revolution in the call centre space, call centre managers should embrace a completely different way of thinking to ensure they get the best out of the many new technologies available. Now, you can control the IVR experience just as easily as you provide new training to call centre agents. After all, we’re saying goodbye to the one-size-fits-all approach in favour of more flexible solutions that can be tailored to the specific needs and requirements of individual call centres.

With access to so many ready-to-use cloud call centre features, don’t be afraid to continually try out new things to see what the impact will be. It is so easy to switch on and switch off quickly implemented options to determine what works best. Engaging a zero-commitment evidence-based design methodology – made possible by the cloud – is exactly what it takes to keep operations at peak performance without wasting time, money, and effort.

it’s just about having the right attitude and outlook to make the transition from old to new a reality.

To find out more about how Oration can help your contact centre download the brochure here. 

Download the Oration product brochure and learn about the features and benefits and how this speech recognition technology works and can improve your contact centre experience.