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As an IT manager for a contact center, you're always on the hunt for innovative technologies while also "keeping the lights on" for your existing customer service systems. And if those systems happen to include old, legacy software, "keeping the lights on" is no small feat.
Today's contact centers rely on technology that enables superior customer experiences, produces timely insights for data driven decisions, streamlines operations, and safeguards customer data. In other words, contact centers require tech-forward CX software that can seamlessly integrate with other solutions.
There's a lot riding on your ability to identify and support solutions that will help your organization compete now and well into the future. Forward thinking brands are using customer experience as a competitive differentiator, which elevates the role that contact centers play in their business strategies.
Is your technology up to the task?
Addressing Crucial Concerns in Contact Center IT Management
Today's customer service IT leaders have plenty to think about when it comes to contact center technology. The following areas are probably very familiar to you and may even keep you up at night sometimes.
Customer data security
Contact centers collect and store a wealth of customer data, including addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information. That information makes your systems attractive targets to hackers.
According to one source, there were 3,205 publicly reported data compromises in 2023, which affected an estimated 353,027,892 individuals. Globally, the average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million, while the cost of a data breach in the United States was more than twice that.
The lack of secure AI customer service platforms can also result in substantial fines from organizations that set data security standards for specific industries. For example, noncompliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) can result in monthly fines as large as $100k and can even result in the loss of your business's ability to accept and process credit cards.
Less tangible is the impact a data breach has on your brand's reputation. Failing to secure customer data is a violation of trust that can have a long-lasting negative effect on customer loyalty and acquisition and, ultimately, revenue.
Technological advancement
Are you struggling to keep an old, on-premises system up and running? Or perhaps your team supports newer software that doesn't fully support business requirements. Either scenario can put your IT team in an uncomfortable position.
Tech-forward CX software is exponentially more capable than older legacy systems. Modern platforms are typically in the cloud, infused with artificial intelligence, easy to integrate, and offer capabilities such as automation, omnichannel experiences, and smart self-service. Compare that to outdated systems that are inflexible and may not even meet baseline requirements such as real-time reporting.
Even newer systems can fall short because not all contact center solutions are created equal. In fact, there can be wide disparities from one system to the next. Some software may not have omnichannel capabilities, while others may not include AI analytics. These variations make the software selection process crucial to getting what your business needs to execute its CX strategy. And, of course, your IT team should be included on the selection team to help ensure your organization chooses the right enterprise-level AI CX systems.
Integration ease
If you're using an older platform, you may also be struggling to integrate it with other systems.
Integration is key to meeting today's consumer expectations. Customers want to be able to move seamlessly across channels, which is only possible when channels are integrated and can pass data among themselves. Additionally, consumers prefer to handle their own, simple matters, which requires self-service solutions to be integrated with automation tools and back-office systems.
Integrations also enable operational efficiency. For example, when call center software is integrated with CRM systems, transcripts of interactions can automatically become part of customers' CRM records, eliminating the need for agents to document conversations. Additionally, integrations can enable IVRs to authenticate callers so that agents don't need to perform that step.
These are just a few examples of how integrations can improve efficiency and CX. Having a platform incapable of advanced AI CX integration creates an unnecessary barrier to CX enhancements and process optimization.
System management
Older, on-premises systems can be burdensome to support. Your team may be spending too much time applying and testing software updates and patches, maintaining hardware, and fulfilling requests from the business such as developing new reports and changing routing rules. Wouldn't you rather spend that time on innovation? Your team members probably would.
In fact, being the system administrator of an outdated system can be a drudge that negatively affects employee experience and engagement. And if your platform is really old, you might even have trouble finding someone with the right skills to support it.
Ultimately, implementing a scalable customer experience solution that safeguards customer data, includes leading edge technology, and is easy to integrate and support is the right path forward.
How NICE CXone can help contact center IT managers overcome their top challenges
When evaluating enterprise-level AI CX systems, add NICE CXone to the top of your list of contenders.
CXone is a cloud-native contact center platform that incorporates the latest technology in order to delight your customers, streamline operations, and remove burdensome tasks from your IT team. The NICE CXone Open Cloud Foundation powers rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely, deploys quickly, and serves customers of all sizes globally.
Data security
The platform is rigorously tested though regular penetration and intrusion detection exercises, all proactively monitored by two NOCs on a 24/7/365 basis. You can be assured that your customer data is being safeguarded with state-of-the-art data security measures and technology.
We think data security is so important that we have dedicated a team of experts to it. The NICE Trust Office is an organization of cloud security experts, tools and processes that provide superior security, compliance and reliability by safeguarding contact centers. The Trust Office drives security across CXone through a meet-and-exceed approach to audits from external entities.
Our rigorous approach has enabled us to create a secure AI customer service platform that is in compliance with multiple industry data security standards, including:
CXone is infused with modern technology and designed to transform customer experience and contact center operations. Artificial intelligence is used throughout our software to add efficiency and enhance CX. Some examples include:
Enlighten AI for CX solutions.Enlighten AI makes everything along the customer journey smarter, from effective self-service to intelligent routing to identifying customer sentiment trends.
Workforce management. Because of AI, our workforce management software can suggest the best forecasting algorithm for your contact center's unique characteristics.
Real-time interaction guidance. Agents are in a unique position to make positive connections with customers, and our tech-forward CX software empowers them to do that by providing real-time coaching on their soft skills.
Interaction analytics. Our interaction analytics solution transforms raw, unstructured interaction data into actionable insights such as call drivers, emerging issues, and possible compliance violations.
Meeting the demands of today's consumers requires a flexible contact center platform that leverages the latest technology. For more information about how artificial intelligence makes NICE CXone an industry leader, visit our Enlighten AI for CX page.
Seamless integrations
You can't deliver exceptional CX or fully optimize operations if your systems don't talk to each other. Ease of integration is another capability that sets CXone apart from the rest.
When it comes to integrations, we offer options. If you have the development expertise in house, you can create your own custom integrations using over 400 APIs, the same RESTful APIs we use to build our own applications.
If you'd rather outsource, we have a very active developer community, plus a CXexchange marketplace with over 150 pre-built, pre-tested integrations. Chances are, the integration you need is already built. It's tough to beat that level of simplicity!
Because we host the system, we're responsible for management tasks such as updating software, maintaining hardware, and keeping databases finely tuned. Our multi-cloud, multi-region and multiple availability zones deliver expansive redundancy and real peace of mind. Plus, our guaranteed 99.99% platform uptime, including maintenance windows, means the days of laboring to recover from a system crash are over.
CXone is also highly configurable, empowering end-users to make their own changes to things like routing rules, IVR menus, IVR messages, and reports. Removing the need for IT support for these tasks frees up your valuable resources and allows your contact center to react to changing conditions more quickly.
If you're currently evaluating enterprise-level AI CX systems or just want to know more about our technology, download "NICE CXone Open Cloud Foundation."
