Customer Contact Expo 2014: a lesson in all things omnichannel
Last week the Cisco team headed to the Kensington Olympia in London with a host of partners in tow for Customer Contact Expo 2014. This year’s event gave guests the opportunity to share in our vision of how tomorrow’s contact centres are changing into what is being termed the ‘customer engagement centre’, which is set to transform the customer experience.
With over 5,000 attendees from sectors far and wide, the stand was a hive of activity for the two days. Many visitors to the stand were already in conversation with us about Cisco’s contact centre solutions, so the expo gave us the chance to really cement those relationships.
This year’s event was all about two things: the Cloud and Omnichannel. Deployment models are transforming at a rapid rate and it’s no secret that everyone seems to be talking about moving over to the cloud, so vendors were keen to tell this story.
Being Omnichannel, meanwhile, means that a business has the capability to meet whatever kind of communication experience the end user wants – whether a customer wants to talk to a company in the branch or via email, social media, web chat, video, or any other digital media, it must be able to facilitate that interaction. The contact centre remains the single best place to make that decision.
With our partners on the stand, we were able to outline to visitors our joined up approach to the next generation of customer engagement solutions, many of whom were bringing similar concerns. The first was migration to a new solution – there are very few ‘new’ contact centres out there, and the majority of businesses are faced with having to replace old technology with new infrastructure. Doing this in the easiest and most painless way possible remains a key challenge for businesses, and is something we’ve worked hard to mitigate.
The second is an industry myth that it’s okay to integrate these new ways of communication into existing systems, and that bolting new applications onto an ancient platform is good enough. This won’t work – all you end up doing is creating siloed channels. These applications need to be fully integrated at the back end in order to effectively contribute to the customer journey.
We often hear people questioning whether the contact centre is still relevant, and I respond to that with a resounding yes – the contact centre is the engine room where businesses can create a fully integrated omnichannel experience, as it enables them to see the full spectrum of communications with a customer. However, it must be supported by the right infrastructure.
This idea of customer engagement is only set to grow, and will mean that the traditional voice-only call centre model will continue to decline as uptake of other digital channels continues to soar. I couldn’t be more positive about the future of the contact centre industry, and look forward to next year’s event.
2 Comments
Great article Martin, and I think it clearly points out that Omni-Channel is more then Video with some extra functions on top or in parallel of what already exists. Omni-Channel is an interaction and communication concept which requires a lot more.
Great post Martin, I believe the Cloud is playing a major role in the contact centre technology shift. In terms of Omni-Channel, the Cisco Remote Expert solution brings so much to this vision and will be interesting to see how organisations begin to shift their business mind-sets in support of their customers.