SaaS Products By Themselves Won’t Enhance Your Contact Center, But Integrated Solutions Will
If we consider Henry Ford’s famous quote,“ You can have any color, as long as it’s in black”, there certainly was a time when companies set the standard and consumers were the willing recipients of whatever businesses disseminated. However, today the environment has drastically reversed, with customers clearly dictating “what, where, and when” without much care or consideration as to “how”. As a result, businesses are scrambling to keep up with the changing expectations of the very consumers they wish to please; a tall order unless you have a crystal ball and a genie handy.
Adapt with a Purpose
Adaptability has become the new prerequisite for business success, and contact centers are no exception. Luckily, with the advent of cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, the ability for enterprises, both big and small, to create their own customized platforms has never been more in reach. In fact, by the end of 2014, companies are expected to utilize 9.6 SaaS solutions on average, from CRM (Salesforce), to WFM (Verint), to Ticketing solutions (Zendesk), to accounting software (Intacct), to Contact Center solutions (3CLogic)—the list goes on. However, in a world in which customer service is crucial to any bottom-line, collecting a number of SaaS products is fundamentally pointless if they fail to work as a cohesive and complete solution with your current or future communications platform. In fact, the unfortunate outcome has been the creation of technologically advanced businesses with huge untapped potential and completely dysfunctional processes. One has but to evaluate the current failure in first call resolutions (as low as 30-40%) to quickly realize that despite the flexibility and benefits of SaaS products, subscribing to individual solutions does not inherently make businesses more adaptable to change; they must be integrated.
What Contact Centers Need to Become
Today’s contact center represents the frontlines of any well-run enterprise. But to deliver on customer expectations, easy access to all the records available throughout the business is essential. Integrating your cloud contact center solution with your CRM is but the first step in what should be a concerted effort to integrate all data sources throughout the company. In short, a good cloud contact center solution should be the glue that binds a business’ various solutions together, making the whole integrated package greater than the sum of its separate parts.
Imagine the benefits for:
Management – With access to every department within one consolidated solution, key insights into your business, from accounting, to workforce management, to support, etc., can finally be consolidated to provide a truly complete 360-degree view of both your customers and your enterprise.
Representatives – Consider the potential increase in customer satisfaction if your rep was able to notice and address a client’s delinquent bill (perhaps due to an incorrect address) during a routine support call, thanks to integration between the company’s contact center and accounting solution. Or imagine the added benefit of seeing all pending and historical client support tickets by virtue of integrating your contact center and ticketing solutions. In short, when you consider that 60% of low first call resolution rates can be attributed to a lack of access to timely and relevant data, the value of fully integrating your contact center with other department software (other than just CRMs) becomes evident.
Customers – The comprehensive insight provided by a fully integrated contact center, will let you go beyond your customers expectations, and not only meet their immediate needs, but also those they may not yet know they have. It’s a win-win.
Conclusion
Businesses are failing to meet client expectations and demands largely due to the fact that customers are becoming better informed than the companies servicing them. And as long as businesses continue to silo their departments and software, the ability to deliver on customer expectations will likely remain a pipedream regardless of the strength of the individual solutions at play. Your cloud call center solution is the voice of your CRM. But fully integrating it with every other aspect of your business can only facilitate both the transfer and effective use of the many customer data points otherwise available within your enterprise. Together, with your contact center leading the charge, your many software platforms will finally equal one potent company solution. 
3CLogic is a leading provider of cloud-based contact center solutions. Offering next-generation multichannel communications, business intelligence, dynamic scripting, as well as seamless third-party integrations, we built our products to meet today’s needs and tomorrow’s challenges.
To learn more visit: www.3clogic.com