Transformation has been on the docket for contact centers for more than a decade now. But with enterprise-wide adoption of new technologies like the cloud, artificial intelligence, automation and more skyrocketing, demand to evolve – now – and unlock digital transformation’s promised value has never been higher.
That value, however, is often elusive for contact centers. Gartner found that half of all change initiatives fail, and only 34% are a clear success. Most business leaders report that ROI on digital innovations often doesn’t materialize, most commonly due to the challenges of moving beyond early-stage pilot and adoption work, according to Harvard Business Review. For contact centers in particular, just 20 percent of companies are successfully using new digital applications and technology to boost agent performance and reduce customer effort, a study by Customer Contact Week Digital found.
Often this is due to the complexity of implementing and integrating multiple technology solutions. The push for digital transformation means that contact centers must embrace advanced workforce optimization, recording, quality, analytics and other solutions, frequently at the same point in time. The rapid rate of change today means that time – time to implement a single technology before moving on to the next – is a luxury the contact center can’t afford.
But when adopting so many new technologies at once, it often isn’t clear how to navigate the landscape of change, prioritize initiatives or identify what will drive rapid ROI. Transformation can simply feel overwhelming.
To build a complete technology portfolio and fully transform your contact center, consider leveraging a partner focused on value realization, one with the specialized expertise to help you achieve the “how” of digital transformation with these approaches:
Construct the right environment for change
Technology alone is not enough to deliver transformation – after all, people are motivated by emotions, experience and support from those they trust. Contact center leaders must leverage change management to tap into these motivators and enable frictionless interplay between technology and people if they are to successfully drive enterprise-wide evolution. They can do so by:
- Conducting KPI assessments to identify opportunities for change.
- Creating a prioritized, actionable roadmap that provides a unifying vision and rallies teams behind transformation.
- Establishing centers of excellence focused on operational effectiveness, efficiency and best-practice standards.
- Implementing business analytics to unlock insights that enable the data-driven decision making necessary to achieve value actualization.
- Providing best-practice training that empowers the success of everyone in the organization and helps them understand both how and why change is occurring.
- Putting the right governance framework into place to ensure that technology is implemented in alignment with organizational goals.
Implementing these strategies establishes a powerful framework to optimize transformation quickly and create the foundation for a system that will thrive long into the future.
Tap into specialized expertise
After a large-scale investment in multiple new technologies, expectations are high that value will climb immediately. But it can be a challenge to source the right talent necessary for ongoing success and to understand what’s causing technology challenges. Consider looking to outside managed services specialists who can provide subject-matter expertise in your platforms of choice and pinpoint the root cause of problems with hands-on application management, operations and performance services. These experts can bridge the gap between organizational capabilities and transformation needs by proactively identifying risks and providing 24/7 monitoring and response, health checks, service analysis and trends reporting.
Integrate new and legacy platforms with an eye for business needs
Out-of-the-box features may not cover every unique need of a business environment, and digital transformation doesn’t have to mean settling for the status quo on the platforms you’ve chosen or with an existing technology environment. Organizations can move the needle on ROI even further with custom integrations and systems that eliminate disparate, redundant and competing silos. That’s critically important when juggling change across multiple functions. It allows contact centers to put the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time.
Hard-to-solve challenges like integrations with third-party platforms like Salesforce, cross-platform integration and more maximize the value that can be unlocked from digital transformation. The right partner can help you identify gaps that can be solved with customization and advanced services to develop solutions that create a holistic environment for success.
Digital transformation affects every corner of the contact center, but that doesn’t mean leaders have to pick and choose which initiatives to focus on and which to put aside. Wholesale transformation is within reach with expert support; tapping into the right resources opens the door to a quicker pathway to your desired future state.
NICE Value Realization Services (VRS) helps contact centers unlock greater value when adopting multiple NICE platforms. Its bespoke services are focused on the people, process and technology evolutions that drive successful business transformation. NICE VRS brings together the right mix of business advisory, data analytics, managed services and platform customization that contact centers need to achieve success. Learn more about NICE VRS.