Here's why that's a good thing…
"In the new contact centre, we're no longer reliant on hunt groups, and can onboard new services and new desks very easily, which has allowed for a much higher level of agility in terms of how we connect and collaborate with our colleagues and partners. We've also got a much higher level of control, so we don't need to go through our IT teams to make changes or updates when we need to, and can constantly refine our call flows."
Stacey Whyte, NHS Digital
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Now more than ever, organisations across the public and private sectors depend on seamless, secure, and high-quality communications. Even with an increasing range of channels having established themselves in recent years - including voice, email, video, and SMS - voice services remain a key part of how we communicate and collaborate.
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As part of an ongoing effort to offer greater consistency and transparency across their full range of solutions, Microsoft have recently announced several pricing updates.
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A common perception of contact centres is that their callers - be they customers, patients or end users - only contact them if something is wrong. Nonetheless, throughout 2020, we have seen this underrated (but nonetheless essential) part of the overall customer experience enter a new stage in its evolution.
But with distributed workplaces and the way organisations communicate with customers and colleagues irrevocably changed, what will the contact centre of the future look like and what does this mean for organisations and their callers?
A great agent experience means a great caller experience
Contact centres of any sort are very much social environments, where the human touch is everything. And that engagement must be maintained throughout every point of contact between agents and callers, whether it's face-to-face over a video link, over the phone, or through online chat.
But throughout 2020, we have seen a shift in how this is accomplished, with the opening up of a wide range of new channels of communication through which callers can engage with agents. This includes voice, online chat and video - all of which provide the agent to access sophisticated Unified Communications platforms that not only deliver a consistently high-quality customer experience, but through Cloud technology and intelligent automation, are fully integrated with the rest of the IT ecosystem. This way, with the full range of caller data at their fingertips and direct connections to internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), contact centre technology becomes invisible, and agents are free to focus on delivering successfully resolutions.
Beyond reducing the average time spent on calls and increasing the number of quick, successful resolutions, this model of Unified Communications ensures agents can continue interacting with their colleagues when working remotely, just as they would in the traditional contact centre environment, leading to a smoother, less stressful environment that enhances their performance and wellbeing. And this, in turn, leads to better employee retention, by ensuring agents are properly supported in their daily work and ongoing development.
A model for future contact centre environments
It's often argued that the move to a Cloud-based model for contact centres was a reactive one, in direct response to COVID-19, and to a certain extent this is true. But while it's true we could not have envisaged such a fundamental transformation taking place so rapidly and such a scale just one year ago, Cloud adoption has been steadily on the rise for a number of years now. In other words, the technology needed to implement remote working at scale has been available for some time.
Nonetheless, once the required standard of connectivity was achieved, there were still numerous challenges to consider. By their very nature, contact centres work with a high volume of personal information, which means privacy, data security and compliance are all key requirements. Overcoming these depended on close collaboration between organisations and their technological partners, with many longstanding partnerships across the UK revealing their true value. In particular, technology partners who could integrate multiple channels of communication within single platforms - true Unified Communications solutions – proved invaluable to the success of many organisations' Cloud transformations.
Bringing together customer service and business growth
With the move towards a distributed workforce now very much complete, organisations in both the public and private sectors are shifting their focus from implementation to long-term growth and sustainability. Historically, gathering actionable customer data is often time-consuming and inefficient, especially when working with multiple channels of communication. Unified Communications and Cloud-based contact centres solve this problem, allowing call data to be consolidated within a single platform, with all sensitive information stored securely, in line with all applicable data protection regulations.
Streamlining and automating this process provides contacts with a steady stream of valuable call data, ensuring targets are consistently met, opportunities for improvement are identified and acted upon, and agents enjoy ongoing professional development. But beyond that, this provides the wider organisation with a real-time view of how their products and services are being delivered 'on the ground', and how their customers, patients or end users view them. As this model becomes more and more established across a range of sectors, we expect to see contact centres shift from a purely reactive role, to playing a major role in organisations' ongoing business growth.
A model for future contact centre environments
While we are still very much in the early days of the 'new normal', the principles we have explored in this article are far from theoretical. At Exponential-e, we have participated in these contact centre transformations numerous times throughout 2020. An excellent example of this was our partnership with the NHS in South-East London, in which we successfully helped GPs and frontline staff transition to a remote working environment, continuing to engage with their patients through multiple channels from wherever they are based. Our UC-ONE for Health solution was deployed across six boroughs and 206 GP sites, integrated with existing EPR systems, with the first 1,000 users online in just 48 hours. The system was subsequently extended to more than 5,000 frontline staff over the course of three weeks, ensuring the usual high standard of patient care could successfully co-exist with social distancing requirements. All this was accomplished completely remotely, thanks in part to Exponential-e's deep experience with Cloud migration and well-established network.
This approach is by no means confined to the healthcare sector. The beauty of the Cloud is its flexibility and scalability, which means similar strategies could be used to execute Cloud transformations in contact centres across a range of challenging industries, to the benefit of organisations, agents and callers alike.
Afshin Attari, Exponential-e's Director of Public Sector & Unified Platforms, discussed these topics in greater depth at the recent Servion webinar, "Realigning CX to the New Normal with Best of Breed Service Providers". Click here to watch it.
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At first glance, 2020 was the year organisations in both the public and private sectors wholeheartedly embraced Unified Communications (UC), in direct response to the challenges presented by COVID-19.
However, while we certainly saw a surge in uptake of UC solutions as part of the wider move towards remote working, this was more the culmination of a long-term trend rather than a completely new development. Organisations across a wide range of sectors had been exploring the integration of multiple communication and collaboration tools, particularly in contact centre environments. COVID-19 has simply accelerated the process, to the point where UC is now firmly embedded in many organisations' day-to-day working practices, with no sign of this changing as we prepare for a post-COVID world.
Moving from attractive concept to proven model
The most important development for UC in 2020 has been the successful delivery of benefits that were previously seen as purely theoretical. In this way, the technology has moved from being simply promising to a proven, well-established model that organisations at all levels have been successfully utilising for several months now. Key developments have included:
- Home working has moved from being occasionally utilised to the new norm for the workforce as a whole, with it now being expected by potential employees. Longstanding concerns about its effect on productivity and morale have near-universally proven to be unfounded, with many employees stating they are happy with more flexible working arrangements.
- Customers and end users now expect to be able to contact agents through a range of different channels – including online chat, video calling and voice calling – with a fully consistent quality of experience across all of them. As a result, the overall UX experience has become a key priority across all platforms.
- As UC is now firmly established and has demonstrated its full range of capabilities, providers are shifting their focus from demonstrating what the technology can offer, to delivering (and where necessary, developing) solutions to achieve specific business goals. In this way, we are seeing the relationship between UC providers and their customers shifting, from the simple provisioning of technology to robust partnerships that support sustained business growth, scalability and operational resilience.
We've seen these trends play out throughout the year, in numerous organisations' successful migrations to remote working and the Cloud, and as we approach the end of 2020, they show no sign of slowing down. So as we approach the new year, where is this leading?
2021 and the next step in Unified Communications
If 2020 has taught us anything, it's to expect the unexpected. While we now have a reasonable idea of what the post-COVID landscape will look like, agility will be the primary factor organisations will seek to cultivate in their workforce and infrastructure. Pivoting in response to future crises must be a question of days or weeks, not months, and so we expect the long-term trend of Cloud migration and an increasing emphasis on Cloud-first and multi-Cloud strategies to continue. This will, in turn, support the implementation of technology that drives remote communication and collaboration, with a lot of on-premise technology – and even the office space itself – becoming increasingly streamlined in order to control costs and maintain scalability. Similarly, we would anticipate more and more services to be delivered through a consumption-based model – something the Cloud excels at.
In terms of communication channels, integrated, multichannel communication will introduce a number of opportunities regarding AI, with chatbots providing contact centre staff with an extra level of efficiency, without compromising the quality of caller interactions. This will grant organisations an additional level of flexibility with regard to employee working hours. The implementation of AI combined with a secure, effective remote working solution, and consumption-based pricing means that organisations and their employees are no longer limited to the traditional working hours or office environment. For example, contact centres can ensure staff are always available to respond to callers, and agents can arrange their working hours around family – a win/win situation for everyone.
Following our win at the 2020 UC Awards, where we were awarded Best Cloud Communications Provider, our Director of Public Sector & Unified Platforms, Afshin Atari, sat down with UC Today to discuss his perspective on what this year has meant for Unified Communications and what the next one is likely to hold. Watch the video here.
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The Customer
The customer is a central governing body that utilises the growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels to optimise the delivery of critical services across the UK, while ensuring the highest standards of security and compliance are maintained at all times.
The Challenge
In 2019, with their existing contact centre solution reaching the end of its life, the customer made the decision to seek out a new platform that would better suit their ongoing drive for the more efficient, effective delivery of critical services, particularly the growing demand for secure, scalable omnichannel communication. Beyond simply routing phone calls, the desired solution would deliver deeper insights into every stage of the customer journey, from the first point of contact to the eventual resolution - and utilise these metrics to consistently maintain a responsive and flexible service delivery that would support the best possible outcomes.
Key considerations included:
- A resilient, scalable multichannel environment - encompassing voice, email, SMS, webchat, and all major social media platforms, that would maximise opportunities for engagement with citizens.
- The ability to configure all elements of the interface to staff's requirements, making it as efficient and user-friendly as possible, with clearly defined supervisory levels.
- Robust cyber security and governance inherent in the design, ensuring data protection policies would be consistently applied and all compliance obligations met, while optimising the accessibility, quality, and utility of all data.
- Granular and broad visibility across the entire solution, allowing administrators to tailor the solution within predetermined parameters, allowing tools and processes to be continually refined in response to feedback.
- Bespoke dashboards and reporting, allowing analysts to effortlessly access key metrics and monitor every step of the citizen journey in real-time.
- Seamless integration with existing platforms, with scope to integrate further tools in the future.
Based on these criteria, an in-depth evaluation was conducted of eleven separate contact centre solutions, measuring their capabilities against a detailed list of requirements and the customer's long-term tech and data strategy. At the end of the assessment process, Exponential-e's deep experience across the public sector, consultative approach, and openness to developing bespoke solutions made them a clear standout, with their Contact Centre as-a-Service solution fulfilling all technical requirements. As a result, they were selected as the customer's technology partner for the new contact centre's design and implementation.
Key factors in this decision included the Cloud-based model, which aligned with the customer's ongoing Cloud transformation journey, the inherent flexibility the platform offered in terms of hybrid working, the ability to integrate existing apps, and its highly intuitive user interface.
Solution
In the run up to 'go live', the Exponential-e's project team worked closely with the customer's own teams to ensure agents were ready to adopt the new technology. Following extensive training, agents were able to make full use of the new platform on the same morning the legacy telephony system was switched off, without any disruption to live services. The already strong relationship between teams at both companies, established during previous complex deployments, proved invaluable here, with close communication and collaboration at every stage laying the foundation for the project's eventual success.
As all interactions were now taking place through a single, fully integrated platform, the consistent application of skills-based routing ensured citizens were put in touch with the appropriate agent as quickly as possible, with time on hold kept to the absolute minimum. In addition to optimising the path to successful resolutions, this also meant that analysts could access all data about each citizen's journey through a centralised knowledge base, regardless of the number of channels involved. A combination of real-time analytics and automated satisfaction surveys was utilised to measure the quality of each interaction.
To ensure this data could be used to its fullest potential, the customer was able to create bespoke dashboards for a range of metrics, including the channels and menus enquiries were received through, wait times, the agent who handled each, whether the call needed to be transferred, and the final time to resolution - all updated every fifteen seconds. This way, both analysts and supervisors could access a wealth of information on both agent performance and citizens' overall experiences, without needing to consolidate information from multiple channels and records, as had previously been the case.
With this critical information automatically collated in an actionable form and the ability to automatically apply service changes through the dashboards, the new contact centre enabled true data-driven decision making at all levels, so tools and processes could be constantly refined and, ultimately, the highest levels of service quality and availability maintained.
As an early adopter of hybrid working, the new contact centre only strengthened the customer's capabilities in this regard, granting supervisors maximum flexibility in terms of how agents were deployed, without compromising data security, call quality, or their ability to collaborate with their colleagues whenever necessary.
The new contact centre is constantly evolving, as the high volumes of data gathered during each interaction reveals new opportunities for service enhancements. Administrators can continue refining their tools and processes via their dashboards, with support available from their Exponential-e account team and a 24 / 7, UK-based support desk, whenever it is required.
All of this demonstrates how the ever-growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels can be used to improve wellbeing across the UK, and the potentially transformative power of technology when utilised in service of the public good.
Solution benefits
- A flexible, omnichannel solution for all citizen communications, optimising the delivery of critical services across the UK.
- A holistic view of every citizen journey through intelligent, real-time analytics.
- Automated tracking of agent performance, helping drive a culture of constant improvement.
- Fully tailored for hybrid working, ensuring consistent security and service quality wherever agents are connecting from.
- Full compliance with all applicable regulations around the handling of citizens' data, while ensuring it remains readily accessible to authorised individuals.
This brochure offers an in-depth exploration of Exponential-e's entire UC and CC ecosystems, all of which we deliver in bespoke combinations to optimise your internal and external communication strategies.
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