As the fiscal year 2019 draws to a close, most business leaders are forced to hoist a familiar bag of bricks, the strategic plan for the year ahead. It’s a daunting exercise each year to calibrate your investments for the next 12 months. Where do you spend? Where do you cut? Answering these questions for 2020 is even more difficult with the wild card variable of just what the economy will do in 2020.
With as many data points and analyses pointing to a slowing economy or at worst, a recession and an equal number of data points pointing to a continued bull run, where investments to one’s business should be made aggressively. It’s a delicate balancing act.
First, let’s address the areas of your plan that make the most sense to prioritize. Most will not argue that customer experience remains as the perennial contender for the top slot on any list. With the technology stack being a close second.
So let’s talk about the customer experience and where one can realize the greatest return on their investment, the contact center.
One of the biggest transitions occurring in the contact space is the emergence of the digital channel. While traditional voice IVR and ACD remain an enormous functional component of the modern contact center, increasingly customers are choosing to interact via SMS, web, chat and social channels.
Simply put, there are more channels for us as consumers to choose from. Each of these channels carry value for different use cases with more routine transactions increasingly being pursued through chat or social whereas more complex inquiries, voice is still the preferred interaction. Giving your customers a choice, is a BIG driver in improving customer experience and driving customer loyalty. What’s more, it represents the first critical steps into transforming your contact center to a competitive advantage.
The ‘cloudification’ of the contact center has enabled businesses to more easily and expediently implement modern features that help to drive this change. For businesses that are struggling to make this change culturally, keep in mind that while there is an upfront cost to the deployment of a cloud contact center, the long game pays dividends. Your agents can handle a greater load of inbound inquiries and requests, working the traditional inbound ACD while also handling inquiries via chat. Even the costs associated with maintaining traditional voice infrastructure (think, # of PRI’s) begins to trend down overall reducing cost while improving performance.
The 2020 planning process is undoubtedly a critical moment for business leaders but the underlying question of ‘how do I do more with less,’ is the transcendent theme year over year. And the lowest hanging fruit (pardon the overused corporate jargon), is undoubtedly in the contact center. It allows you to drive significant ROI and leveraging a cloud contact center allows your organization to build the foundation for implementing features that will prove transformative to your organization long beyond 2020.
Join our webinar series on 2020 planning where we’ll explore the investments you can make to your contact center that will elevate your organization to win in the experience economy.
