One-size-fits-all contact centres are a thing of the past. As customer expectations continue to grow, businesses need access to more flexible solutions that allow them to provide an efficient and personalised CX.
Modern CCaaS, or “Contact Centre as a Service”, solutions run in the cloud and can leverage deep integrations to connect all your favourite business tools. “More and more applications are running in the cloud and the depth of integration between these is constantly increasing. You can seamlessly integrate your tools into the contact centre and turn it into an experience hub from which you can steer all your enterprise interactions,” says Philipp Beck, CEO from Luware.
With the right integrations, you can deliver more personalised service, reduce call resolution times, increase customer satisfaction, and enhance business insights.
The Benefits of Bringing Integrations into the Contact Centre
CCaaS solutions offer extensive call management and contact centre functionality. Increasingly CCaaS solutions are also merged with Unified Communications platforms like Microsoft Teams and offer a single integrated platform from which you can steer all internal and external communications.
Robust CCaaS systems also provide extensive analytics for monitoring important contact centre metrics that help you improve your processes.
But what truly makes CCaaS solutions powerful is the ability to integrate all your business applications. Companies can use integrations to connect their contact centre to:
- Customer relationship tools: Connecting the contact centre to the CRM landscape empowers agents with a 360-degree customer view. Agents can automatically see who is calling and provide personal and efficient service. You can then automatically log calls into the CRM to ensure it’s always up to date. And you can even track important information about a customer’s previous purchases and company interactions or use customer data to distribute calls to the relevant service.
- Case Management: Integrating your ticketing system into the contact centre can improve service desk efficiency. You can automatically open tickets or create a new one when agents get a service call or quickly create and assign tasks. That way, agents don’t need to hop between systems; they can access everything from one platform.
- In-depth analytics: Aggregate reporting data from all your sources, including your contact centre, into one data warehouse. A holistic overview of all data allows you to make better decisions and leads to enhanced business results.
3 Ways to Leverage Integration in the Contact Centre
There are a few ways to get started for companies looking to unlock the power of integrations for their contact centre. The right strategy for each business will depend on what they hope to achieve with their contact centre environment. Here are three effective options.
Choose a Flexible CCaaS Vendor
The first, and perhaps easiest, option for leveraging integrations in a contact centre is to choose a CCaaS provider with an open and flexible platform. As the communication landscape continues to transform, many CCaaS innovators are giving companies more freedom to add their own functionality with native integrations for market-leading apps.
A cloud-based CCaaS solution with an open framework can provide companies with quick and straightforward integrations to choose from, arranged into a convenient “app marketplace”. Many top vendors offer pre-existing integrations with CRM solutions, ERP tools, workforce management capabilities, and even service desk technology.
The benefit of this strategy is that it is straightforward to implement new integrations into the contact centre without much pre-existing technical knowledge. However, companies will need to ensure that the CCaaS vendor they choose already partners with the right companies.
Certain CCaaS vendors can even help business leaders create new connections between different applications and ecosystems. Alternatively, these companies may work hand-in-hand with developers and other partners to enable integration access.
APIs and SDKs
APIs or “Application Programming Interfaces” have become increasingly valuable in the age of integration and flexible contact centres. These tools make it possible for two different platforms to connect with each other seamlessly, often with very little initial setup.
