Scalable Contact Centre Solutions Support Endless Possibilities

When businesses that live or die by their ability to communicate with customers choose to move on from legacy comms systems, their choices have long-term effects. In addition to the upheaval of migration, new working methods and business processes will arise. This emphasises the importance of the core communications capability.

In an organisation’s history, there will likely have been a transition from copper lines to VOIP, or MPLS (leased line) to SD-WAN, for example. These migrations took time and effort and had long-reaching effects on working practices, customer relations, agent productivity levels, IT overheads, and many more parts of the business.

Decision-makers would do well to cast their nets widely to see the full range of choices available. Apart from the current pain points that must be addressed, making the right decision will also help avoid going through another long change management process in the next few years. The right solution for a contact centre or customer care function must be based on extensible and elastic technologies to ensure any investment will last in the long term.

The basis for decisions will be to address a need for better CX. Second, to embrace new ways to engage with both customers and agents. There will be some broad targets for improvement too, such as improving customer satisfaction metrics and a year-on-year lowering of costs.

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Sometimes it’s a simple matter of taking a “hard” issue, such as call capacity or lack of instant messaging capability, and ensuring that migration to a new platform is open-ended enough to provide solutions. At the core of extensibility, elasticity, and scalability is technology. Here, cloud-based systems offer multiple possibilities, so companies can take on new capacity or abilities like deep CRM integration to improve agents’ capabilities and scale resources at peak times.

It’s also become apparent over the last year with the increase in remote working that agent experiences are critically important. To attract and retain the best talent, working practices must be market-leading. Companies demonstrably ahead of the curve offer systems that support hybrid working and AI-powered technologies like voice-to-text, sentiment analysis, and workflow improvements.

The goal is to reduce staff churn and agent burnout effects such as long-term sick leave. That alone will save significant costs, and overall personnel satisfaction is always reflected in the quality of customer care.

However, decision-makers need to think in more broad terms about their communications platform’s implications for the rest of the business. For example, seeing the back of on-premises telephony equipment may reduce IT costs for upkeep, licensing, and maintenance. But any new platform must integrate seamlessly with the rest of the IT stack. Without an open architecture, one set of costs is replaced by another — in this case, a new team of specialists required to maintain fragile APIs between contact centre systems and the rest of the IT stack, like the company-wide ERP, for example.

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Native interoperability from market-leading platforms also ensures that no data silos are created, and information flows to and from every part of the enterprise, giving value in each area. Where the business meets, talks, texts, and exchanges messages informs every business function at a deep level, helping customer care to establish a constant and important presence in the enterprise’s strategy. Today’s business intelligence (BI) is powered by real-time data that needs little or no manual intervention to have value — digital-first systems provide just that.

While the communications platform market in the UK is well-stocked by vendors with multiple options, many of these have grown out of legacy systems and still come with finite limits on their capabilities. Those limits dictate how far a platform can continue to support and bring value to an enterprise that has ambitious plans well into the long term.

Of the pure-play digital innovators in this space that we at Tech HQ have considered, the cloud-native Five9 communications and collaboration platform is one of the few that’s both established (read: rock-solid, secure) and innovative (read: smart and forward-looking). Combine that industry gold standard with the UK’s primary business telephony and cloud communications specialist, Onecom, and the way forward becomes clearer.

Onecom’s status as the 2021 EMEA Innovation Partner of the Year for Five9 has been superseded by the award of the Five9 EMEA Partner of the Year 2022. Onecom brings local market experience with a global view and can help create customer contact comms systems based on Five9 technology that are innovative, solid, and extensible well into the future.

If you’re shortlisting potential suppliers for your contact centre upgrade or refresh, you’ll want to choose the solution that brings both specific, in-department benefits and value to the business at large. Reach out and book an appointment with Onecom and Five9 to discuss the options and the solutions that will ensure longevity and quality.