Author transcript
Hello and welcome to UC today. I’m Kristian McCann and today we are looking at a growing challenge for global enterprise teams and that is how to deliver a consistent customer experience as businesses expand into new regions, markets or even acquire new companies. Um, many organizations might be ready to sell into a new market, but their CX might not be able to support it. Um, this leaves regional teams having to pick up their own tools, their own routing rules, and have to deal with multiple vendors, often without a connected foundation underneath. So, what does the technology behind global CX actually need to deliver this? and how should IT and CX leaders be thinking about it? To discuss this, I’m joined by Rachell McConkie, contact center product owner at CallTower.
What uh Rachell, thank you for joining us.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
So, just to give us like a lay of the land, what should IT and CX leaders be assessing first when they’re planning to support customers across multiple regions?
Yeah. Yeah. Great thing to consider. Um many companies are really expanding their global footprint um through acquisitions, natural growth um or the expansion through their companies. We really see quite a few different verticals we work with when they’re going into the global market. We often times see people ready with the product. They think about the sales cycle. How can we get those customers in on those first contacts? Um but oftent times what we’re not considering is the full customer experience. What does support look like once they’ve gone live? Are we able to handle those tier one support? If it escalates, really what does that look like? Um, so really having the business tools is one side of the equation, but being CX ready means understanding the full customer journey, what they need to be excited about your uh company and to work with you and then to stay with you long term with that retention. So having the business tools is one piece but being customer experience ready means the full journey.
Okay. The full journey. Um that’s great. Obviously I imagine this is going to be built on a very steady and solid foundation. So what does this connected communications and contact center foundation actually need to look like?
Yeah. Companies need to understand not only how customers are reaching out, how they’re going to reach back out to their customer base. Um, and that looks different for each industry and each region. If I’m a group of hospitals and I want to expand globally, there’s different governances we have to take into consideration. There’s data sovereignty, um, PII. So not only having a consistent structure for the company to work under to then stretch and go into local governance and make sure that you’re covering both consistent uh consistently across the board.
Okay. And so what does this foundation this connected foundation allow when CX uh operations actually adopted it and what can it allow them to do when they’re working across countries?
Yeah. Uh so when we are working across different countries you got to know which channels you want to communicate on phone omni channel uh virtual agents with AI there’s all different ways to manage the customer journey um and as you can imagine that can get disparate very quickly and then reporting journeys and data gets really messy. So if you’re able to have a consistent structure, communicate that to your different regions, everyone is operating on the same principles, the same SLAs’s, then when you pull reporting, you’re really measuring apples to apples and not measuring different SLAs’s with different reporting tools. Um and it’s really important that companies look at that across their unified communications, their contact center, uh even integrations with CRM, EHRs, um and then you bring in AI. So making sure that entire journey is consistent across regions but specialized for your individual governances.
Okay. A lot of great operational practices that could be harmonized with this. I was wondering speaking of harmonization what could the centralization help in terms of monitoring or visibility for leadership so that they can diagnose issues.
Oh yeah. So if we have data in different areas and not in real time, we could be solving an issue that is no longer valid or you are unable to even see an issue because you’re looking at different reports. Um, if a supervisor or an admin has real- time data across multiple regions, maybe let’s say in a live dashboard, they can go through and spot issues in real time. I could, as a supervisor, jump in there with my agent, maybe correct a customer service issue, um, or even go as far as, do we need to add menu options or different items to really help. um solving the problems in real time with accurate data really enables us to solve the business problems right away.
Okay. Well, um there’s a lot of great things that this connected foundation can bring businesses. I’m sure many will be listening and kind of eager to get hold of this, but what needs to be true for their technology for the service to hold to one standard no matter what region a customer may call in from?
Great, great question. Have you heard of the the tree gathering Pando in uh southern Utah?
Please tell me all about it.
Oh, it’s my favorite thing. So, there are 47,000 trees that look individual, but they’re all connected by the same root system. It’s about 106 acres of all genetically one tree. Um, but as you walk through the forest, everything is an individual unique growth pattern and it’s beautiful. um your contact centers and your UC collaboration need to work just like that. We need to be genetically all one under the surface, but as a customer or a patient or a member, if I’m interacting with your team, um it needs to be that individual experience. It needs to feel localized while we still have an entire um global governance underneath. So making sure that companies have the right rules, regulations, standards, making sure we’re following the right SLAs’s, all of that builds up into this beautiful forest that people can then localize um in their own countries.
Well, that’s a brilliant way to illustrate this. Um going back to this then how can companies get these capabilities you know without having for them to take on a new vendor for one so that they can all be one one tree but with different branches all across the area.
Yeah, great question. If you run out and get a different vendor in every region for every need, they’re out there. um you could end up with five different call recording solutions, all compliant, all helping your individual needs, but the economy um of scale of that isn’t great. You end up with multiple contracts, multiple renewal dates. You end up with maybe dis or duplicate systems. So then you’re paying for two CRM when you really only need one. So if you’re able to look at your global picture, select softwares that are connected. Um, one of the things I really love about CallTower is we do have UC, CC, CRM, AI all pulled into one region. Um, so you can say, hey, what do I need across the globe and how does that support it? If you look at those things ahead of time, do some deep discovery within your own industries um, and set it up properly ahead of time, you’re going to have connected data, you’re going to have secure data. We’re going to make sure that we have the global governance set and then your individual supervisors or admins for the countries or regions you want to expand into have a set of tools to work with and grow from rather than creating all of that from scratch.
Okay. Well, that’s a great place to leave it. Rachell, thank you for your fascinating insight on a connected foundation and also some very interesting facts about trees. I really appreciate it. [laughter]
Yeah, thanks for having me.
And as always, thank you to the audience for watching. If you’ve enjoyed this discussion, don’t forget to like, comment, and of course, subscribe to stay in touch with more great videos like this. I’m Kristian from UC Today, and until next time, we shall see you then.
