Contact center leaders are evolving and moving their operations and infrastructure to the cloud. Nuance is accelerating and improving that process with a suite of AI services that integrate seamlessly with any Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) or cloud provider. Here’s how we’re taking the CCaaS revolution to the next level and helping contact center leaders deliver consistent omnichannel brand experiences with future-proofed solutions that unlock the full value of the cloud.
Over the last few years, we’ve witnessed the accelerating transformation of the contact center with brands using digital and voice-powered technology to bring their customer engagement visions to life. That includes the shift of contact centers to the cloud. Doing so enables enterprises to quickly increase agility, reduce costs, and focus on serving customers instead of managing infrastructures. Nuance has advanced as well, shifting the focus of our technology innovation, the customer engagement solutions we deliver to customers, and many of our own operations to the cloud.
The new cloud imperative
The promise of lower TCO and greater flexibility makes it easy to see why so many contact center leaders are moving to the cloud. The business case is so compelling that the global CCaaS market is growing at an impressive 23.1% CAGR and expected to be worth $44.8 billion by 20251.
It’s never been more important for contact center leaders to determine if partnering with a CCaaS provider is the right approach for their organisation and if that provider enables more agile and responsive operations. CCaaS investments also should deliver longer-term ROI with future-proof solutions that can be adapted and expanded as needed via the cloud.
However, too many cloud contact center platforms are focused on taking advantage of current market demand – and customer IT budgets – without a clear commitment, demonstrated ability, and domain expertise needed to address current and future needs. Contact center leaders simply can’t afford – financially or competitively — to wait for or chase promised benefits at the expense of customer satisfaction. Finding out months or years down the road that a selected provider cannot deliver needed solutions over time is troubling enough. Finding that out after having discarded investments in existing on-premise infrastructure is even worse.
Avoiding the potential pitfalls of CCaaS
The difference between success and regret comes down to taking a careful and detailed look at the provider platforms and experience, especially in vertical and highly specialised markets. There are a few common mistakes to avoid:
- “Rush to the cloud” vs. optimise for the cloud: An IVR that’s been optimised over 15 years, for example, can’t simply be rewritten to run on a new CCaaS platform. There must be careful planning and a clear understanding of how and when existing applications will be optimised for the cloud. That includes setting explicit expectations that the cloud solution will match or exceed on-premise system performance.
- Insufficient integration expertise: Integration issues can arise during migration that can interrupt customer service and lead to higher call volumes and lower customer satisfaction. This is more than a case of tolerating migration hiccups. Even a 1% drop in IVR containment can equate to lost savings and issues with contact center staffing. That’s especially true for IVRs that have been highly tuned for vertical use cases. Successful integration requires a combination of carefully planning, technical expertise and domain experience.
- Vendor lock-in: The added flexibility and cost-savings expected when moving to a CCaaS provider can be negated if new applications lack portability. Think ahead to what might happen if you need or want to change providers due to market or technology changes, strategic realignments, M&A, or other events. Waiting for a vendor to catch up to your needs or going through a migration do-over is costly in multiple ways. What’s more, partners that offer multiple platform types will find it easier to help customers migrate solutions when they can leverage one common set of AI services.
- Expectations vs. experience: The sheer demand for cloud migration and the number of offerings can lead some enterprises to believe that all CCaaS providers can deliver everything they had in on-premise infrastructure to engage, serve, and sell effectively. Elite CCaaS providers will be clear upfront about how and how well they can meet your specifications. Nearly all CCaaS providers offer call routing, customer engagement, and agent workforce management. But the devil is in the details, especially regarding their capabilities in advanced natural language processing that companies need and expect for automated and seamless omnichannel brand experiences.
Enter: Nuance Contact Center AI for CCaaS
Nuance offers access to our core speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and natural language understanding and dialog engines through open APIs. We also offer Nuance Mix, our conversational AI tooling platform, which makes DIY development simpler—and more effective—than ever.
In addition, we now provide a suite of cloud-native AI services that integrate seamlessly with any CCaaS provider to add an intelligence layer to their cloud-based contact center. The result is that companies can realise the full value of the cloud by combining flexibility, scalability and superior TCO with market-leading customer engagement, biometric security, and agent empowerment solutions. This enables them to take a true optimisation approach to cloud migration while protecting investments in existing infrastructure and future-proofing their modernised cloud solution.
With Nuance Contact Center AI services, you can move to the CCaaS provider of your choice, deliver superior customer experiences, and maximise long-term ROI with:
- Application reuse: Eliminate the need to rework your applications, so you can accelerate deployment and keep costs down, while maintaining or improving the customer experience.
- Zero CX disruption: Protect your customer experience, with expert migration assistance to ensure your existing applications deliver same or better performance on your new CCaaS infrastructure.
- Extensibility: Our common set of AI tools and technology lets you maximise your prior investments with the ability to build on and expand from voice to digital applications and create omnichannel brand experiences with a consistent UX and minimal need to rewrite.
- Portability: Add an intelligence layer that works with all major CCaaS providers, so you can change vendors whenever you want and take your core NLU, libraries, and applications with you.
Unlocking the value of CCaaS
It’s an exciting time to be working with contact center leaders and giving them the ability to realise sustainable long-term ROI from the cloud, not just short-term cost-savings. I’m also excited to see our customers transform their operations by combining the best of the cloud with our best-in-class Contact Center AI services. There’s huge potential for them to realise significant business value from their existing and cloud investments well into the future.
Sources:
1Cloud-based Contact Center Market – Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2020 – 2025), Research and Markets, 2020
