The digital space can be highly competitive. One thing to keep brand loyalty is to maintain a great customer experience, even in the absence of a brick-and-mortar store.

As such, contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions—a cloud-based method of managing customer relationships—were developed to keep up with the demand for timely, efficient, and effective customer service. Through this method, enterprises can use a contact center provider’s software instead of maintaining costly internal IT support. 

These are just a couple of customer experience trends discussed in the latest episode of CLOCKWORK, a Globe Business podcast that examines the gears that make businesses tick. In this episode, host Peter Maquera, Senior Vice President for Globe Business, Enterprise Group, talks with Assaf Tarnopolsky, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific at Genesys, a leader in cloud customer experience orchestration. 

Genesys is our partner in delivering the Globe Omnichannel (GO) Cloud Contact Center, an easy-to-use and fast-to-deploy CCaaS solution for large enterprises.

Learn how customer experience has evolved through the years, how cloud contact centers support today’s hyper-digital world, and how businesses can take advantage of the latest trends in customer experience delivery.

1. Shift to cloud-based solutions

Due to the challenges posed by the pandemic, many contact center providers moved to a work-from-home model,  which is likely to be adopted over the long term. To enable companies to embrace remote work and efficiently serve their customers across digital touchpoints, it makes more sense to invest in cloud-based solutions rather than hold on to maintenance- and labor-intensive legacy platforms.

“I guess the synonym to the cloud is ubiquity,” observes Maquera. “The world is just going straight to the internet through the Cloud as opposed to going to on-premise platforms.”

Cloud contact centers, such as the GO Cloud Contact Center, are easy to deploy, integrate, and scale—you can deploy customer organization systems in days, go live in mere weeks, and reach payback in no time. And with just a simple refresh, you can give your customers the latest system releases every week, without experiencing any downtime for updates.

Cloud-based solutions also work on a pay-per-use model, allowing you to optimize features, functionalities, and services when you need them. This lends more flexibility and cost-effectiveness compared to on-premise legacy platforms which tend to over-provision, thereby wasting company resources in the process.

2. Go omnichannel

The adoption of cloud-based solutions is a welcome shift as more customers are also turning to non-voice channels—such as SMS, email, and social media—to resolve their issues. As such, contact centers are now expected to provide a seamless customer experience across all these channels.

Omnichannel, as the name suggests, monitors and supports customer interaction history across all channels. For example, if a customer calls after sending an email, a contact center agent will be able to read that email and all previous interactions with that particular customer.

It may sound like a big industry word but, at its core, omnichannel simply means being where the customer wants to be met. “Omnichannel allows you to engage with customers wherever they might be, and in a way that they want to be engaged with,” adds Tarnopolsky.

3. Personalize the customer experience

In 2021, Genesys published a report called the Connected CX Report and it revealed some interesting insights into what customers of today want:

• 79% of consumers want to engage with customer service employees who understand their needs

• 77% of consumers want to feel listened to

• 74% of consumers want to feel that their time is valuable

As these results reveal, “personalization trumps speed of resolution,” says Tarnopolsky. “When a customer feels that they are known, heard, and valued, they will feel better than if their specific transaction is solved a little bit more quickly,” he adds.

As such, cloud contact center solutions help enterprises win the day by powering not just automation but also personalization. This “confluence of technology and human interaction,” as Maquera puts it, weaves together seemingly disparate elements into a seamless and smoothly orchestrated customer experience.

4. Embed cybersecurity in all channels

The downside to working remotely? “The more you are working from anywhere, the more your omnichannel is exposed to more threat actors as well,” cautions Maquera. 

“Security is the foundation and must be at the core of what we do to elicit customer trust. The key is to deliver meaningful, empathetic, and personalized experiences to serve customers better at every step,” shared Tarnopolsky.  

GO Cloud Contact Center, for example, ensures that your customer and business data remains secure. It meets and exceeds modern security standards with external penetration testing, attack defense automation, and TLS and AES-256 encryption, the gold standard in symmetric-key encryption techniques.

5. Empower your contact center agents to work from anywhere

Given the shift to remote and hybrid work setups, companies must be able to support this new normal structure and empower agents to work from any location. 

With cloud contact centers, your agents can access the customer information they need within a single, intuitive platform, thereby getting a 360-degree view of your customers. “Your agents can work smart whether they are working from home or at a contact center,” says Tarnopolsky.   ​​

GO Cloud Contact Center has features and capabilities such as predictive analytics and Agent Assist. Tarnopolsky adds, “This surfaces the right kind of information at the right time and helps agents solve problems more expediently,” which leads to shorter call hold times, thereby increasing engagement and improving communication and brand loyalty.

To know more about Globe Omnichannel (GO) Cloud Contact Center, visit our website or get in touch with your Enterprise Account Manager today.

For more business insights from industry experts and enterprise executives, listen to the CLOCKWORK podcast by Globe Business—now streaming on Spotify