Contact Centres need to evolve to serve the omni-channel generation

BT launches a cloud contact centre solution to help traditional contact centres keep up with technology and changing customer behaviours

 Contact centre managers and directors in Ireland believe it is challenging but critical to deploy the right technology to provide customer service fit for the ‘omni-channel generation’, according to a BT Ireland survey to coincide with the launch of its new cloud-based contact centre solution for Irish and multinational organisations with local and global operations.

The survey of 100 contact centre managers and directors showed that 95% of centres use some form of traditional on-site telephony and contact centre infrastructure, despite 43% seeing it as a financial drain and 46% frustrated at the difficulty of integrating new infrastructure.

Other statistics from the survey include:

• 90% of contact centres are looking to make a change to their current set-up, driven by the need to roll-out new features, to better serve the omni-channel consumer, the requirement to stay up to date with compliance, and to save money
• 72% of organisations have concerns around security when it comes to cloud contact centre adoption
• 69% of those organisations using on-site or legacy contact centre infrastructure agree that a cloud-based solution could be very positive for their business, while 22% stated they were not sure of the role it could play
• 86% of organisations that have adopted cloud-based contact centres believe it has made a positive or transformational impact on their business
• 24% said they will be fully cloud within three years, and 71% said they would be running a hybrid cloud infrastructure or seriously considering the adoption of one

Consumers increasingly want to use different channels to communicate and organisations must be more adaptable, flexible and agile to meet these expectations. Contact centre managers perceive it to be difficult and costly to integrate legacy on-site technology to do this, but moving a contact centre into the cloud means organisations don’t have to spend capital on costly hardware or rip out existing systems. It is simply an overlay over their current infrastructure and can grow as their business grows,” said Graham Fagan, Head of Contact Centre & Multichannel Propositions, BT Ireland.

BT Cloud Contact is an ‘out of the box’ cloud-based contact centre solution, designed to help organisations address changing customer expectations driven by digital communication channels such as social media, webchat and video. It is a single integrated platform for telephony and contact centre management providing a full range of functionality, enabling customer service to be delivered over multiple channels but connected together within the organisation to provide a seamless customer experience, regardless of channel used.

With BT Cloud Contact, agents can manage multiple types of customer contacts from a single desktop, while ensuring each contact is recorded and tracked centrally.

Agents can work from any location, meaning experts are available on demand regardless of where or how the customer enquiry is made.  The technology allows organisations to flex capacity up or down in line with operational needs and is available as a ‘pay-as-you-go’ service.

BT is also introducing social media tools for agents using BT Cloud Contact. This allows cloud-based scanning and monitoring of social media networks, incorporating those into normal contact centre operations to help provide a full omni-channel experience. Relevant social media posts can then be presented to agents as a live feed which they can then choose to action.

BT Cloud Contact offers contact centres a global cloud solution with an established local footprint to satisfy regulatory and compliance concerns.  The solution harnesses the reach and reliability of BT’s global voice network, allowing customers to originate calls from over 170 countries with flexible access options. Customers will also have peace of mind from a security perspective by being able to access this cloud service across BT’s world-class IP wide area network, storing important items such as call records (if required) in data centres in Ireland.

“BT manages 10 billion minutes per year of inbound voice calls to our enterprise customers’ contact centres globally. We understand voice; we understand contact centres and we’re enabling new online channels such as social media. This makes us the partner of choice to help organisations deliver an outstanding omni-channel customer experience,” added Fagan.

BT Cloud Contact has been developed in partnership with Magnetic North, a leading cloud provider, whose technology is already being provided to 136,000 ‘telephony and contact centre seats’ globally.

For more information on BT Cloud Contact visit http://www.btireland.com/cloudcontact_land.shtml