January 16, 2019 by Siobhan Climer
Customers call your contact center every day. Even as the kinds of channels customers use to reach you expand to include self-service, chat, text, email, IoT, and more, phone calls still make up most of contact center inbound contacts.
Chances are you rely on interactive voice response (IVR) to facilitate these interactions. Unfortunately, the outdated IVR trope is prevalent. Frustrated users dialing ‘0’ forty-two times, shouting angrily into their receiver or smartphone are not abnormal, though, hopefully, not the norm.
Then, your IVR is out of support. Here comes the big CapEx. Installation. Deployment. Updates. Patches. Training. Second-guessing. The caller pressing ‘0’ forty-one times (is that really better?) and a general sigh of malaise.
As contact centers look ahead, many are reluctant to invest heavily in a new IVR, given the growth in natural speech recognition, IoT, AI, machine learning, and other emerging technologies. Add to this the poor performance of older IVRs and it makes sense to move towards something different.
But what?
Contact Center Platforms Offer New Features (And Hope)
There’s another way! When your IVR is out of support, contact center platforms can provide the structure of an IVR while seamlessly tying together the interactions between callers (and multichannel contacts), agents, and supervisors.
Benefits Of Contact Center Platforms
- Improved scalability
- Increased ROI (571%!)
- Call recording
- Call reporting
- Workforce Optimization/Workforce Management
- Decreased downtime
- Improved personalization tools
- User-friendly for both customers and agents
- Easily integrates with other applications
- Improved collaboration and analytics
Mindsight is a Cisco Gold Partner and Genesys PureCloud Elite Partner, working to offer on-premise or cloud-based contact center technology solutions to organizations throughout the U.S. When a company’s IVR is out of support, they look to us to help them build a contact center roadmap into the future.
Contact Center Platform Options
Unlike IVRs, there are numerous ways to deploy a contact center platform. Whether your team seeks to maintain an on-premise contact center solution or migrate operations to the cloud, contact center platforms can help you get there.
Cisco Customer Journey Solutions
Cisco UCCX – Built for contact/call centers up to 400 agents, this platform covers the needs of a large majority of businesses. Contact Center Express delivers the cutting-edge capabilities of an advanced contact/call center operation.
Cisco UCCE – By linking clusters of contact/call centers, Unified Contact Center Enterprise is structured to accommodate contact/call centers of up to 12,000 agents.
Cisco PCCE – Packaged Contact Center Enterprise fills the middle range between UCCX and UCCE. PCCE is appropriate for simple deployments.
Cisco CJP – Cisco’s new cloud-based Customer Journey Platform is almost ready for release, and Mindsight has been part of the exclusive training to provide these services to our clients.
Genesys Contact Center Solutions
Genesys PureCloud – PureCloud is the next generation cloud platform that provides the fastest time to deployment and a cost effective, scalable, multichannel contact center and unified communications solution.
Genesys PureConnect – PureConnect (powered by CIC and CaaS) is the all-in-one contact center solution that enables you to interact with your customers over phone, chat, text, or tweets all within a single application while offering customization and integration.
Cisco and Genesys aren’t the only platforms on the market. Want to know more?
Reach out to our contact center specialist team today.
IVR Is Out Of Support. Who You Gonna Call?
When your IVR is out of support, it might seem there is no place else to turn. The truth is there are better solutions available today for contact centers ready to make the leap into the future. Are you one of them?
Start with a contact center roadmap and end up where you want to go. To find out more, contact us today.
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About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.
About The Author
Siobhan Climer, Science and Technology Writer for Mindsight, writes about technology trends in education, healthcare, and business. She previously taught STEM programs in elementary classrooms and museums, and writes extensively about cybersecurity, disaster recovery, cloud services, backups, data storage, network infrastructure, and the contact center. When she’s not writing tech, she’s writing fantasy, gardening, and exploring the world with her twin two-year old daughters. Find her on twitter @techtalksio.