Technology is advancing at lightning speed, creating exciting new opportunities for contact centres.

IT professionals can help spot and seize the right opportunities that will help your organisation improve, innovate and excel, but with any change, comes challenges. Do you have the time, budget and resources required to make the change? Are you equipped to handle a crisis? And most importantly, will the customer benefit?

If it’s time to digitally transform your contact centre, here are Puzzel’s top tips for IT managers.

1) Embrace integration

Build a feature-rich, omnichannel customer service platform. Take advantage of the latest APIs to develop your own bespoke integrations that both meet the operational needs of your contact centre and support the strategic goals of your organisation. The latest cloud-based contact centre solutions link effortlessly with knowledgebases, CRM, speech recognition, ticketing and other critical business applications that can boost efficiency and productivity while reducing effort and costs.

2) Improve control with customisation

Administration portals are the engine rooms of IT operations, and the right one can make all the difference! Choose a flexible, scalable, web-based customer service platform with an admin portal that offers a comprehensive range of tools to improve contact centre management with real-time monitoring, detailed statistics, and the ability to make critical service changes when required.

3) Gain deeper insight with desktop and process analytics

The latest desktop and process analytics work hard in the background so IT managers don’t have to. Use them to gain valuable insight into agent desktop activity. Are they using the right applications? Are PC or CRM issues holding them back? This type of intelligence can help optimise productivity, improve processes and ensure compliance.

4) Digital transformation or digital disruption?

It’s important to consider how technology will bring value to your contact centre. Take Artificial Intelligence (AI) for instance – everyone is talking about it, but business leaders are unsure of how to use it and fear being left behind. This is a great opportunity for IT managers to take the lead and guide the rest of the organisation through a pragmatic approach to AI best practice and deployment. Encourage strategies and investments that will benefit customers rather than just jumping on the bandwagon. What communication channels should AI be used for? What enquiries should virtual customer assistants (VCAs) deal with? These are some of the important questions to ask before developing, trialling and deploying your AI strategy.

5) Future-proof the omnichannel experience

Product roadmaps often cover the next 12 to 18 months, but smart IT professionals should plan to look much farther ahead. Take a visionary approach to product development, designing technology that supports a variety of customer communications and systems, for example advances in softphone, while anticipating the expectations of the next generation and beyond. 

6) Make life easier for agents

Sit in your agent’s seat – if they have messy screens, it’s time to act. Remove the clutter by introducing the latest agent applications. The best agent desktop apps link directly to CRM systems, mobile apps, social media networking sites and even the latest consumer review websites, such as Trustpilot.com. This gives agents all the information they need in one place, so they can respond swiftly to customers without having to switch applications or manage pop-ups. Make life easier for agents – they’ll love you for it and so will your customers!

7) Take that final leap of faith into the cloud

Migrating to the cloud may sound difficult and costly, but it’s not! Did you know:  

• There’s no need to rip out legacy systems
• Cloud solution resilience levels are consistently high
• Upgrades and software rollouts are straightforward
• Scaling the contact centre is easy, even when it comes to adding new agents and communication channels

The flexibility of cloud technology gives IT managers greater control and customisation of their environment, while centralised, virtual data storage boosts security.

Don’t do it alone!

IT professionals play a critical role in transforming the contact centre, but don’t do it alone! Reach out to senior managers and sit down with contact centre supervisors and agents to truly understand where the pain points and inefficiencies lie within the business. Deploying the right technology the first time will save you precious time and money. 

Puzzel and Vonage

Digital Transformation is a journey, and for contact centres sometimes the technology choice is easier than the implementation. Puzzel and Vonage have worked together for over three years and have delivered advanced application integrations, including WhatsApp, for Puzzel customers. We understand that no two customers are the same. Find out how we can support your use cases by unlocking your free custom demo.