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Nothing lasts forever. It’s a familiar saying and a simple concept in theory. Yet, in practice, it can be a difficult and costly lesson to learn. It’s only human nature to be comfortable with the status quo and resistant to change — even when making a change is the best decision. Many businesses struggle with a legacy contact center infrastructure that doesn’t support today’s customer expectations of seamless, personalized omnichannel service.
They battle daily with the limitations of an outdated system and waste valuable IT resources managing time-consuming, difficult upgrades and never-ending migrations. Meanwhile, as the old, familiar system gets pushed beyond its limits, stability falters, and service is compromised. As new communication channels are added, the situation becomes more precarious. If this isn’t reason enough to consider a new contact center solution, many have the added uncertainty that their vendor for contact center solutions is facing an unclear financial future. With customer expectations continuing to rise and evolve, the importance of having future-proof investments from a vendor continuing to invest in innovation is not just a good idea. It’s essential to your long-term success.
The good news is if your contact center infrastructure is nearing end-of-life, you have options. There is a clear migration path to an integrated, customer experience platform that can interoperate with your existing systems and support all channels and touchpoints. Through this transformation, you can gain reliability, stability, and the future-proof foundation necessary to provide a great omnichannel experience. The following steps can help you make the transition.
- Evaluate Where Your Organization Is Today and Where It’s Headed in the Future
The first step is to take a close look at the current state of your service organization and where you envision it going in the years to come. Consider the deployment method that will best fit your long-term business needs? For many businesses, cloud deployment offers substantial benefits, including a faster deployment, greater scalability, and a reduced total cost of ownership. Along with focusing on the technology, you will also want to consider how new, advanced capabilities could impact your entire organization. For example, there may be new challenges and opportunities for agents and management as you gain the ability to offer omnichannel service. It will also lead to a rethinking of customer relationships that could require additional agent training or new ways of organizing internally. With a greater ability to offer more personalized self-service, there may even be a substantial shift of customers to self-service channels.
- Decide What Stays and What Goes
Many organizations have legacy systems that provide critical data for understanding and managing the customer journey. Consider the roadmap for these systems and if they are remaining or being replaced with new technology. The same is true for specialized systems for management reporting and operating dashboards. A transition to a new technology platform is the ideal time to rethink what’s needed and how it’s used. In an omnichannel world of more personalized customer journeys, it’s inevitable that you will need new and different tools for monitoring and managing the customer experience.
- Analyze Multi-Vendor vs Consolidation
As your ACD and IVR systems evolved into a more complex contact center, you likely acquired numerous third party systems for very specific functions like workforce management, recording, and quality management. You may even have developed home-grown systems. Managing and maintaining these systems is costly, in terms of the money paid to vendors and the internal personnel costs needed to support and manage them. As your contact center becomes even more complex, managing the integration of these systems is significantly more difficult. You will want to analyze and decide on whether the value of a “best of breed” strategy or the comfort of staying with an existing legacy contact center platform outweighs the benefits of consolidating those functions into a system of engagement.
- Prepare Your Team for Success
The deployment of a customer experience platform that supports omnichannel engagement offers tremendous benefits to customers, as well as to agents who gain the advantage of new tools to deliver optimal customer experience across all channels and touchpoints. However, it’s important to plan for new requirements for higher agent skill levels. This may include the need for additional training and staffing changes.
- Plan Ahead to Support Consumer-Driven Requirements
If you’re already struggling with the limitations of a legacy contact center platform, imagine what the future holds? Enterprise technology requirements are being driven by rapid customer adoption of new technologies and evolving customer preferences and habits. Truly successful delivery of a great, low-effort customer experience and journey will require meeting customers where they are. Today, that means using video, mobile technology, social media, and online communities. It also means providing the level of service customers want, whether it’s fast, convenient self-service or highly-personalized assisted-service. Only time will tell what customers will expect in the future. However, with the Genesys Customer Experience Platform, you’ll have the open-standards infrastructure to continue to meet their needs and exceed their expectations.
A legacy contact center platform could be hindering your ability to deliver a seamless customer experience. Let Genesys help you create a path to omnichannel customer experience. Learn more by reading the executive brief, Technology roadmap for omnichannel customer engagement.
