Category Archives: Contact Center Modernization

Contact Center Modernization, Customer Engagement, System Integration

6 CX Competencies to Driving Better Customer Engagements

Overwhelming evidence confirms that improving CX does drive business results and that prioritizing customer experience is the proven path to success. However, many customers feel that only a few companies engage with them well, and even with those companies there is room for improvement.

So why are companies still struggling to deliver great customer engagements? For many organizations, this requires a customer engagement transformation. And how to go about this is often unclear.

Before moving forward with any CX strategy it’s important for your company to understand why it’s important to improve CX and what this will mean for the organization, including what CX competencies you need to establish. You need to assess where you stand on your journey to CX transformation and benchmark where you are against your competitors. This will help your company understand the level of transformation required as well as the urgency.

Once that’s done, you can plot your strategy. In the June 2017 report “Why and How to Lead A CX Transformation”, Forrester has identified 6 crucial CX competencies that companies must establish to start the transformation: research, prioritization, design, enablement, measurement, and culture.

6 CX competencies to establish and optimize

1. Researching your customer preferences

CX competencies
Figure 1: Forrester’s 6 CX competencies from the Forrester Report, “Why And How To Lead A CX Transformation”

If you are just getting started on your CX transformation, then the first thing to do is research to ensure there is a good understanding of your customers wants and needs. This should be the first competency you look at because otherwise it will be very hard to move forward with the other cx competencies necessary to develop your CX transformation strategy.

2. Prioritizing based on what matters most to both – your customers and your business

Prioritization can be done by ranking your most important customer groups, journeys, and interactions and aligning that with your business values and business success criteria, so you can then move forward with the right focus.

3. Designing customer experiences

Then, you will identify and define the experience you want customers to have based on your CX vision and customer understanding (developed in the research and prioritization cx competencies above). This requires generating ideas, prototyping, testing with customers, and repeating that process many times before deciding that a design is done.

It’s important to not define the experience based on what the business wants. Capture what your customers want, and then design the way the organization engages with customers to meet those experiences.

Remember that you want to achieve the experiences that you define, but you don’t control experiences directly. What you do control is how your organization engages with customers, which then leaves customers to perceive these interactions and this results in the experiences your customers have with your organization.

4. Enabling your employees with training, information, and tools

Once you’ve defined the customer experience you want to deliver, you must provide employees with the resources that they need to properly engage with customers, and ultimately provide this experience.

And so, for some companies this might be the hardest part of their CX transformation. If you are dealing with system and process silos or legacy technology, delivering the right CX might mean upgrading technology or fully integrating your business and contact center systems. Depending on resources, it might take longer to work through this stage. But don’t let that deter you. The alternative option of continuing to deliver low quality CX will hurt your company in the long run.

By having the right architecture in place, you can start providing your employees with training, information, and tools that support the intended experience across all touch points.

5. Measuring CX metrics

To understand if your company is doing CX well, will require you to quantify the quality of experiences and link them to your organizations’ overall metrics. Ideally, you want to analyze what happens when customer interact with your brand, how they perceive these interactions, and what they do as a result.

This might require a shift in how you look at customer interactions and what metrics you report on. For further insights into how to measure CX, read the blog Looking at Contact Center Metrics In A Customer-Centric Way.

6.Establishing a customer-centric culture

To make sure that CX is a priority in your company will require a system of customer-centric values and behaviors that focus employees on better engaging with customers.

This is an especially important competency to continue your CX vision and drive business success. If you try to create this culture without looking at the other cx competencies, you are likely to be unsuccessful.

A good start is to educate employees about your customers, CX vision, and their roles in fulfilling your vision. Reinforcing customer-centric behaviors through routines, celebrations, and rewards is another good way to establishing customer obsession in your organization.

Don’t wait to start your CX Transformation

Some CX competencies you may be more mature at than others. Forrester Research suggests that companies establish the competencies they are missing, and optimize those already established. Eventually all competencies need to be optimized to be a well-managed “customer obsessed” organization, and be able to keep innovating.

Remember that with great CX being uncommon these days, acting now means you can more easily get ahead of the competition.  Putting off the number one way to differentiate your business, will make CX differentiation much harder later on.

For more guidance on a CX transformation & how to implement these 6 competencies watch the webinar “CX Transformation: Six Essential Competencies”.

Contact Center Modernization, Omnichannel Desktop, Routing

Enable Orchestrated Routing for Customer Journeys, Mobile and More!

Although voice is still the primary channel customers use to interact with contact centers, representing 54% of all interactions handled, according to Dimension Data, digital is on track to overtake phone by end of 2016.  Your business needs to keep up with this trend of customer preferred channels by developing an awareness of each customer journey. To do so, you’ll need to migrate to automated, or orchestration-ready, routing.

If you are an on-premise Genesys customer and still on Interaction Routing Designer (IRD) driven routing strategies, but looking to enable capabilities like customer journeys, mobile, and Virtual IVR through your routing strategies—first things first—you need to move to Composer routing.

The transition to a new routing platform can be onerous. It’s important to understand whether your contact center requires the transition. If it does, consider these factors before making the move.

How Do You Know if this Transition is Right for You?

  • You and your team find it increasingly hard to alter the existing solution in a timely, effective manner. Your current system may be unable to support the requested changes or has gotten to a point where it is no longer maintainable.[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • Your team has been tasked with implementing a mobile customer service initiative. Tying customer service more closely to mobile use is a smart strategy for companies but older platforms may not support this or other modern functionality.[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • You want to integrate self and assisted service interactions. To do this, you need the convenience of a common development platform, which is not available in IRD.

Challenges with Typical Transition Approach

If we were to explore the typical transition approach, truth is, it’s easier said than done.

The transition from Genesys IRD to Composer and Orchestration Server is a platform change that requires the new application to be designed and developed from the ground up. This presents challenges:

  • Documentation on your current IRD routing is often limited or non-existent.
  • Features in place for years may work, but may not be well-understood.
  • As enhancements were added over the years, the code has become more complex.
  • Reverse engineering existing strategies is time-consuming.
[su_spacer]Ultimately, the main concern with this approach is that it’s risky and can take many months to implement. The longer the project takes, the higher the cost.

Best Practices and Considerations  for Planning a Routing Migration

Routing is the center of the universe for contact centers.  It drives most of your agent-assisted customer experience, ensures the use of agent resources are optimized and enables reporting and analytics.

Making the transition to orchestration should be planned carefully.  Here are some considerations for a successful implementation that ensures you are meeting your business needs well into the future:

  • Keep the initial Orchestration routing implementation basic and plan for enhancement phases. A routing assessment from an experienced Genesys Systems Integrator can help in developing a project roadmap.[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • Evaluate skillsets and tools available to your routing developers and administrators.
    • Do they have the open source development skills or Composer development experience from other Genesys platforms like IVR?
    • Is there adequate tools and processes in place to manage version control when changes are required to the routing solution?[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • Consider implementing a pre-built routing solution vs. a customized solution. Knowledge of new Genesys Orchestration routing components is a key input into the design of the new routing solution.

Include the Upgrade to Orchestration as Part of a Different Project

Transitioning to orchestrated or automated routing doesn’t mean you have to obtain funding for a routing upgrade project. Likely there are other initiatives you’re already planning where you might include an upgrade to orchestration, such as:

  • A Genesys Upgrade: Upgrading your Genesys Customer Experience Platform to 8.5 or changing the hardware platform requires a full regression test. Why not upgrade routing at the same time?[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • VOIP/SIP transition or PBX Replacement: This kind of initiative requires changes to routing anyway, so consider including Genesys Orchestration and Composer Routing too.[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • Deploying new channels (email, chat, text, and others): Deploy them on Orchestration instead of IRD and only Universal Routing Server.[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • Enabling customer journeys and personalization: Deploy this solution on a platform that will best enable this customer experience initiative by including Genesys Orchestration.[su_spacer size=”10″]

Routing is a key component to delivering omnichannel customer experience. If you are planning any of these projects, consider adding the routing component and transition to Genesys Orchestration to enable modern Genesys capabilities for delivering the consistent and personalized customer experience.

Transition from IRD to Composer with SWIFT™ Routing

The process of migrating doesn’t have to be costly and long. With SWIFT™ Routing, you can complete the transition in fewer than 90 days with a cost reduction of 25% to 75%, depending on the complexity of your requirements.

SWIFT™ Routing is a pre-built and tested solution based on requirements from thousands of projects Aria Solutions has implemented. This means that risks associated with the design, development, testing, and implementation phases are much reduced. See the comparison of risk and effort between SWIFT™ Routing and the typical custom routing approach:

routing-orchestration-project-implementation
The comparison of risk and effort between SWIFT Routing and the typical custom routing approach

SWIFT™ Routing enables quick deployment and allows you to jump right into configuring your routing strategy. All features can be easily configured by any group within the organization. Compared to other solutions on the market, SWIFT™ Routing doesn’t box you in.

SWIFT™ Routing, designed with Genesys-supported capabilities within Composer, uses applications such as Genesys Administrator Extension for configuration. If you decide to add only voice now, you can easily add email and chat later on. If SWIFT™ Routing doesn’t support everything you need, the routing solution can be customized as easily as a routing solution built from scratch.

Currently, SWIFT™ Routing is available in the United States and Canada only. Visit the Genesys AppFoundry to learn more!

Contact Center Modernization, IVR

Modernizing Your IVR is Like Preparing Your Taxes: You Can Only Put It Off for So Long

The deadline for filing taxes is almost here, but are you ready? Did you diligently gather your paperwork in February, and prepare your tax returns yourself? Or did you find that needed home repairs, your kids’ sports events, and the latest season of House of Cards took up too much of your time until it was too late?

If you fall into the latter category, you may have filed an extension, but that only buys you so much time. Eventually you’ll have to get it done.

Similarly, if you’re like many IT directors, your legacy IVR is in desperate need of replacement, but the time it would take to address it is being taken up with day-to-day operations and just making sure your current system is functioning.

To make matters worse (like that friend who tries to persuade you that citizens aren’t “really” required to pay taxes), some checkbook-wielding executives are convinced that IVR is not really worthy of attention compared to emerging social, mobile, or digital customer engagement trends.

A Looming Threat

If you don’t pay your taxes, you can expect the IRS to impose penalty fees, liens, or even jail time.

Likewise, there may be unwanted consequences if you wait too long to upgrade your IVR. With an aging or obsolete system, you’ll spend ever more time, money, and resources trying to maintain something that is becoming less supported and more complex. In addition, your company may end up losing customers due to frustration with the system if your technology falls too far behind.

Not as Bad as It Seems

The good news is that, when you send in your tax returns on time, there’s a chance you could receive a refund, and you get to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to your life for another year.

When you modernize your IVR, you’ll be able to focus on higher-level activities that support your customers and help your company grow. Depending on the technology you choose, the sigh of relief after upgrading your IVR could last for five years or more.

Plus, while taxes and IVR modernization can each seem overwhelming, there are people who can help with both activities. For taxes, you can hire an accountant; for IVR modernization, you can hire a customer engagement solutions provider. In both cases, you get experts to perform lower-level tasks so you can spend your time on other, more important priorities.

Once and Done…For Now

Just as you can continue to procrastinate on filing your taxes, you can put off IVR modernization for a time by implementing multiple fixes to keep your current system maintained.

But, eventually the return on investment will slowly creep down and become negative, causing you to lose time, money, and energy. When that happens, adjust your schedule, get budget approval, call an expert, or whatever else you need to do to get it resolved. As with your taxes, once it’s done, you’ll wonder what took you so long.

To eliminate time, risks and costs associated with IVR manual coding, enhance existing processes and documentation, as well as improve customer interactions, Aria Solutions’ Professional Services Team offers the IVR Modernization solution.

Contact Center Modernization, Contact Center Optimization, Project Implementation

Don’t Squeeze the Life Out of Your New Contact Center Project

Congratulations, your new contact center solution finally received budgetary approval! You have been waiting years for the opportunity to provide a better experience for your customers, a more empowering solution for your employees, and a rich new set of data for your managers. Now you are thinking, “This is my chance and it does not come often. So, I am going to dig my heels in and squeeze everything I can get out of this project.” We don’t blame you! However, starting a project with this mentality does not always generate the best outcome.

Why? You are learning the capabilities of the new solution while at the same time agonizing and scrutinizing over all of those pent-up needs and requirements. This often leads to project paralysis, longer project durations, and a reduced return on investment (ROI).

By the time the project is rolled out, you’ve got implementation fatigue from being involved in the project while continuing to deliver your day job responsibilities. At this point, you accept whatever went into production as you need to move on to other business priorities. The result is something less than you desired. There are usually compromises during the initial deployment and new requirements identified once customers and employees start using the system.

In our experience, it is better to determine complete requirements once the solution is being used. Therefore, we would like to recommend a different implementation approach that reduces project stress, engages customers, empowers employees sooner, increases ROI, and has better end results.

  • Phase 1: Deploy – implement a basic or templated solution as part of the initial deployment. In most cases, the capability being deployed still provides an improvement compared with what is in your environment today. So, a basic solution gets you going with new technology and still provides an improvement over what you currently have.
  • Phase 2: Learn – gather feedback from customer and employees. Compare what they say about how you are engaging with customers, with how you defined your solution.
  • Phase 3: Adapt – enhance, tailor, and customize the solution based on a more thorough set of requirements.

With this approach – time, energy, and costs saved through the “Deploy Phase” are reinvested in the “Adapt Phase”.

From what we’ve seen, this approach results in a higher quality solution with less stress and similar costs. Increased ROI and customer and employee engagement are realized by a quicker initial deployment and through the opportunity to enhance the solution after a period of use.

Contact Center Modernization, Contact Center Optimization, Project Implementation, Routing

A New Way of Implementing the Genesys CX Platform

Robert Church, CEO of Aria Solutions, unveils a new 60-day implementation approach called SWIFT™ Premises – a complete, modernized, Genesys contact center solution that can be implemented rapidly and expanded to incorporate the omni-channel experience customers expect.

“We’ve seen a lot of companies experiencing revenue and customer satisfaction pressures, because they were looking for a new contact center solution and spending years deploying and customizing a new system, while their current systems were no longer meeting business needs and needs of their customers”, says Church.

Aria’s new solution model enables companies to make the investment based on a more efficient and thorough implementation process:

  • Deploying a modernized, enterprise-class inbound contact center foundation in 60 days
  • Learning the new solution and refining the requirements based on findings
  • Adapting to current and future needs by expanding the platform with enterprise-class capabilities[su_spacer]

The keys to this solution is its automated, but flexible deployment approach and its configuration capability, which come from Aria’s pre-tested, pre-built, and pre-validated assets: SWIFT™ Auto Attendant, SWIFT™ Routing, and SWIFT™ Real-Time Reporting. They provide options to meet various contact center requirements, speed up the deployment process, illuminate risks, and allow businesses to retain a complete control over their systems for easy maintenance and support.

In addition to Aria’s assets, SWIFT Premises includes core components, such as: SIP/Legacy PBX integration; High Availability – Dual Data Centers; Desktop and CRM integrations; WFM; Real-time Dashboard Reporting; and More.

“Many contact center implementations spend more time than desired in analysis paralysis, documenting hundreds of requirements, and customizing while learning a new system. This leads to long implementation times while in reality 80% or more of contact center requirements are the same”, says Kelly Wilson, Aria Solutions’ VP of Client Solutions.

Wilson says that Aria’s 20 years of experience in partnering with Genesys, building contact center technology and implementing complete solutions have enabled them to develop a unique implementation approach that no one else has.

Fast deployment, speed to market and adaptability are key reasons why Aria’s new solution approach is called “Swift” – one of the fastest, most agile and adaptable birds on the planet.

To learn more about this solution approach, visit https://aria2019.wpengine.com/swift-solutions/swift-premises/