In 2020-21, contact centres felt the pressure of customer demand and had to step up to the plate or lose customers through poor service. As a result, demand for advanced contact centre software deployments will remain far beyond the pandemic rush. This is creating opportunities for vendors, developers, and their partner ecosystem to innovate, add value and refine digital offerings to ensure organisations of all sizes can push their CX strategies to new heights.
Cees de Jong, CEO of ContactCenter4ALL, looks at the global landscape for contact centre software and their enterprise communication platforms and identifies powerful integrations from artificial intelligence and APIs to engaging chatbots that will unlock further customer-facing value.
Beyond Microsoft
Microsoft Teams is a natural candidate for layering dedicated contact centre software on top of an enterprise comms platform. Its sustained success, popularity, and digital innovation are what made Microsoft and its Teams platform a natural technology partner of choice for CC4ALL. We were able to quickly develop native contact centre functionality essential for our contact centre customers for the Teams platform, in line with Microsoft’s own development roadmap.
New markets, new solutions, new geographies
We’ve seen strong demand for digital contact centre capabilities from digitally mature markets such as Germany, the Benelux, the UK, and the US, and we now see popularity rising on a broader global scale from less mature markets as companies seek to maintain their digital transformation momentum post-pandemic.
The only way is SaaS
We’ve seen customers where migration to Teams and Microsoft telephony has also enabled these organisations to transition away from costly and outdated on-premise hardware, in favour of a SaaS deployment. The benefits are clear: Full access to communications, files, and contact centre capabilities from any location, at any time, in a highly cost-effective model.
Flexibility and scalability are in-demand for organisations of all sizes, helping them react quickly to emerging customer requirements and peaks in demand.
A strong partnership ecosystem is key
Regardless of industry or sector, enhanced CX is the focus for businesses and customer service leaders alike, and that means contact centre software is high up the business agenda worldwide. We need to optimise existing business partnerships and grow the partner ecosystem with Value Added Resellers (VARs), integrators, technology partners, and established distributors. There is also great value in attracting and onboarding new, forward-looking partners with alternative approaches to address CX challenges for businesses.
Bringing IT all together with powerful integrations
At the heart of close collaboration with partners and vendors is the ability to natively integrate our solution and contact centre features directly into platforms such as Teams – transforming them into a true digital contact centre for the future while ensuring employees still comfortably operate in their usual trusted Teams environment.
Pursuing native integrations will help solution vendors provide capabilities and flexible deployment options in as open and seamless a manner as possible – APIs such as the Graph API provided by Microsoft for Teams underpin this. Working with partners helps provide powerful features such as advanced data analytics, recording for regulatory compliance, and rich services to improve both the employee and customer experience.
Time to look to the CX future
It isn’t always possible to anticipate how customer service expectations will evolve over time but establishing a strong digital framework to allow organisations to react in a rapid, flexible manner is vital to sustained service excellence.
Enterprise communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams, already in widespread internal use among organisations worldwide, represent an ideal candidate to layer on dedicated contact centre capabilities.
As major tech companies continue to develop, enhance, and update these platforms, the opportunities to use them as a framework to deliver first-class customer experiences will only rise further.
