Three Reasons to Modernize your Contact Center

There are a lot of good reasons to consider modernizing your contact center: modernization can help you improve customer experience, increase productivity, and weather unforeseen changes down the road.

While it’s an important strategy in general, there are several reasons why modernization is important right now. There are many trends impacting organizations' current contact center priorities. Here are three reasons why transforming and modernizing your contact center can help you better address these trends.

1. Keeping up with Customer Expectations

Customer expectations are higher than ever: 60% of customers say that now, after the crises of the past few years, they have higher customer service standards. The expectation, regardless of demographics, is that businesses should understand and anticipate their customers’ needs, without requiring the customer to spend much time or energy communicating them.

While many businesses are scrambling to meet these expectations, according to a TalkDesk market study, only 11% of customers think that businesses take their feedback seriously. One ongoing issue factoring into this impression is that, for many companies, customer data is siloed across disparate systems. It’s hard for a business to prove they are taking customer feedback into account if your support team can’t easily access the same customer data as your marketing team.

Read the blog: Top Customer Interaction Strategies and Trends in 2022

Many businesses are aware of this issue: that same TalkDesk study showed that 46% of businesses know their biggest contact center weakness is customer data scattered across too many systems.

Modernizing your contact center can help combat issues like siloed information systems or impersonal customer experiences, while automating smaller tasks can help ensure your customers aren’t waiting on hold for help. By giving teams access to real-time information, your agents can provide a personalized customer experience with confidence.

2. Out with the Old

Organizations are run by people, and sometimes people fall for the sunk cost fallacy. It can be difficult to get rid of platforms and products that no longer serve you—especially if you’ve already spent a ton of time and money upgrading them. Some companies are now facing ‘technology fatigue,’ dealing with the accumulation of outdated technological investments that are no longer relevant or helpful, and that would be better off replaced.

Contact center agents are now expected to handle more challenging customer issues across even more channels, and antiquated or outdated technology is providing a bottleneck. Trying to get the most out of outdated tools can be a distraction from developing more modern tools and strategies that can better address and adapt to the current needs of your business.

Modernization can help reduce stagnant technology bottlenecks and provide the tools you need. It’s also key in making sure the technology you have is working in sync—giving you visibility across channels, and ensuring that valuable information is not locked in data siloes.

3. Predicting the Future

While we can make projections about future trends, consumer behaviors, and market shifts, it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what’s to come, or how those coming changes will impact business operations. In 2020, the companies best situated to navigate the then-unknown world of lockdowns and social distancing were the companies that had invested in technology that allowed them to be adaptable and flexible, like omnichannel capabilities.

Modernization can help with building faster, more flexible tools, but it can also help prepare you for the unknown. The best thing next to owning a crystal ball is investing in solutions that enable easier, quicker adaptability – no matter what comes. VoiceFoundry has been helping companies navigate change in the contact center environment and deliver exceptional customer experience for over 30 years. If you want to discuss your modernization journey with seasoned professionals, let’s talk.

Want to learn more about how to build a proactive approach to meet the expectations of customers, agents, and markets? Download our strategy guide, How to Energize and Strengthen Customer Interactions in 2022.