- 14-03-2023
- Rajesh Advani
- Salesforce
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Contact Center Challenges and Drivers of Transformation
Voice remains the number one channel for customer service; study after study shows that a vast majority of customers prefer to use the phone rather than deal with a chatbot or email threat. But at the same time, the experience offered by voice-based customer service conversations is far from great, as they are often disconnected from appropriate CRM and customer service agent consoles. It is estimated that £130+ Billion is lost annually by businesses in the UK, due to siloed contact centers and poor customer service. This number would obviously much much higher, Globally!
A common problem in legacy contact centers is that agents must toggle through multiple disparate systems to address customer needs, making it difficult to answer questions quickly or track customer histories. This results in additional staffing overhead, longer onboarding times, cross-training issues, longer-than-average handling times, and overly complicated and unscalable contact center operations.
Legacy contact center solutions that are on-premise, with outdated infrastructure, can be inefficient when scaled to meet seasonal rises in demand. Other challenges with on-premise legacy contact solutions include cumbersome tools, complex integrations, security and reliability concerns, as well as a heavy dependency on professional services. These can lead to slower resolution times and lower customer service ratings overall.
Today’s contact centers need a more efficient solution for handling call volumes and speeding up call resolution to deliver a unified customer service experience. Customers increasingly expect more connected, personalized experiences across company communications, and contact centers need to keep up. Recent statistics indicate that 83% of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company, and *82% of customers expect to have solved their complex problems after talking to one person. Meeting these needs and expectations of efficient, timely, and personalized service, require call center transformation.
Introducing Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) public omnichannel cloud customer contact center service. Simple and easy-to-use, it enables businesses of any size to scale and supports superior customer service at a lower cost. Amazon Connect leverages other powerful services in the AWS ecosystem to offer cloud-based contact center technology solutions with seamless voice and chat capabilities for customers and agents. This includes features for skills-based routing for voice and chat contacts, interaction recording, powerful real-time and historical analytics, and high-quality voice interpretation.
One big differentiator with Amazon Connect is cost. It is a consumption-based model with no upfront licensing; you pay only for what you use.
Another big differentiator with Amazon Connect is instant scalability. As it is a cloud-based solution, you are not limited by the size of your on-premise telephony or integrated voice response capabilities. With Amazon Connect, it is possible to set up a contact center that can scale to support up to millions of customers with no incremental infrastructure investments on your part.
Introducing Service Cloud Voice
Service Cloud Voice is the other half of this amazing partnership. It is natively built on the Salesforce Service Cloud platform and available with pre-integrated telephony from Amazon Connect. This state-of-the-art contact center solution leverages AI capabilities to enhance communications between contact center agents and customers in a new way.
Service Cloud Voice offers the following features:
- Telephony and call routing integration on one platform
- Integration with omnichannel and Service Cloud Console for easy access to digital and phone conversations
- Voice transcription and analysis that can surface AI-powered suggestions for agent solutions and suggested next-best actions
- Reduced agent data entry and call wrap-up time
- Powerful reporting options with Einstein Analytics
- Real-time omnichannel visibility into all digital and voice interactions for supervisors
- Simple interface that makes it easy for agents to find everything they need on the Service Cloud Console, including:
- Different contact channels
- Conversation transcriptions
- Conversation transcriptions
- AI-driven knowledge sources
Why Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect?
Salesforce partnered with Amazon Connect to come up with Service Cloud Voice for the following reasons:
- To combine the strengths of the world’s #1 CRM with the convenience of a bundled package of contact center services.
- To give contact centers two agile, enterprise-grade platforms capable of bolstering their flexibility and speed.
- To focus on innovation, address business challenges and deliver continuous improvement with three upgrades a year.
- To deliver seamless integration of Amazon Connect with other AWS platform services.
This above stated factors result in a differentiated business value as shown below:
Summary
Service Cloud Voice combines Amazon Connect with Salesforce Service Cloud to give contact center agents and their supervisors situational context and relevant data that can better anticipate customers’ needs. With its natural language processing capabilities and predictive assistance, customers can benefit from a much better and more personalized experience without the need to repeat information, as well as the increased potential for a first-call resolution. Service Cloud Voice also empowers contact center agents with call transcription, Einstein AI-based recommendations, analytics, and easy access to Service Cloud console information, to enable faster call wrap-ups. Finally, contact center supervisors can enjoy the ability to monitor multiple conversations, review and coach agents with Einstein reporting and analytics, and leverage the omnichannel layout to see everything they need in one place.
If you would like to find out more about how we can help you embark on your organization’s contact center transformation journey, please get in touch or email us at salesforce@coforge.com
References*
https://aws.amazon.com/partners/amazon-connect-and-salesforce/
https://pages.awscloud.com/GLOBAL-partner-OE-Convert-NA-SCV-Amazon-Connect-1-2021-confirmation.html