3 reasons to modernize your contact center

There are a lot of good reasons to consider modernizing your contact center, for instance, modernization can help you improve customer experience, increase productivity, and weather unforeseen changes down the road. While it’s an important strategy in general, there are several reasons why modernization is important right now. There are many trends impacting organizations' current contact center priorities. Here are three reasons why transforming and modernizing your contact center can help you better address these trends.

1. Customer Expectations Are Higher than Ever

The evidence is clear: 61% of customers say that they would switch to a competitor after only one bad experience. The expectation, regardless of demographics, is that businesses should understand and anticipate their customers’ needs, without requiring the customer to spend much time or energy communicating them.

While many businesses are scrambling to meet these expectations, according to a TalkDesk market study, only 11% of customers think that businesses take their feedback seriously. One ongoing issue factoring into this impression is that, for many companies, customer data is siloed across disparate systems. It’s hard for a business to prove they are taking customer feedback into account if your support team can’t easily access the same customer data as your marketing team.

Many businesses are aware of this issue: that same TalkDesk study showed that 46% of businesses know their biggest contact center weakness is customer data scattered across too many systems.

Modernizing your contact center can help combat issues like siloed information systems or impersonal customer experiences, while automating smaller tasks can help ensure your customers aren’t waiting on hold for help. By giving teams access to real-time information, your agents can provide a personalized customer experience with confidence.

2. Outdated Technology Is Creating Poor Customer Experiences

Organizations are run by people, and sometimes people fall for the sunk cost fallacy. It can be difficult to get rid of platforms and products that no longer serve you—especially if you’ve already spent a ton of time and money upgrading them. Some companies are now facing ‘technology fatigue,’ dealing with the accumulation of outdated technological investments that are no longer relevant or helpful, and that would be better off replaced.

Contact center agents are now expected to handle more challenging customer issues across even more channels, and antiquated or outdated technology is creating a bottleneck. Trying to get the most out of outdated tools can be a distraction from developing more modern tools and strategies that can better address and adapt to the current needs of your business.

Modernization can help reduce stagnant technology bottlenecks and provide the tools you need. It’s also key in making sure the technology you have is working in sync—giving you visibility across channels, and ensuring that valuable information is not locked in data siloes.

3. Resilience Means Keeping Up with Technology Advances

While we can make projections about future trends, consumer behaviors, and market shifts, it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what’s to come, or how those coming changes will impact business operations. However, we do know that during the worst of the COVID pandemic, the companies best situated to navigate the then-unknown world of lockdowns and social distancing were the companies that had invested in technology that allowed them to be adaptable and flexible.

Modernization can help with building faster, more flexible tools, but it can also help prepare for the unknown. The best thing next to owning a crystal ball is investing in solutions that enable easier, quicker adaptability – no matter what comes.