Contact center solutions

The contact center, also known as the call center, is a key component of an organization's customer experience (CX) strategy. It serves as a centralized point for managing customer interactions across various channels. Contact centers typically consist of agents responsible for providing customer support, handling customer complaints and assisting with sales via calling, email, text messaging, chat, social media and online. 

Contact center technology continues to evolve due to rising customer expectations and complex omnichannel journeys. Customers must be able to browse, shop, purchase, engage and interact with organizations when, where and how they want. Supporting this streamlined experience requires flexible and scalable contact center solutions that reduce friction for customers and agents. Increasingly, this means deploying cloud-based contact centers to improve the CX, reduce costs and drive customer loyalty.

AI in the contact center

Contact center AI is revolutionizing how businesses interact with customers and manage operations. AI technologies can help contact center leaders reduce costs, unlock actionable customer insights, resolve issues faster and improve customer satisfaction. By automating mundane tasks, AI can also free up valuable time for agents, allowing them to focus on more complex customer issues. This transformation turns contact centers from cost centers into strategic value enablers. Key AI use cases for contact centers include:

• Conversational AI agents: Enhance self-service capabilities by resolving customer issues without human intervention.
• Predictive analytics: Analyze historical data to predict customer behavior and improve service strategies.
• Automated call summarization: Generate concise summaries of interactions to boost agent productivity.
• Real-time agent guidance: Provide immediate assistance and insights to agents during customer interactions.
• Automation of routine tasks: Free agents from repetitive tasks to focus on complex issues.
• Automated Quality Management (AQM): Evaluate all customer interactions for deeper insights and improved performance.

On-premises versus cloud-based contact center solutions

Organizations can choose to host their contact centers on-premises or in the cloud. When it comes to cloud-based contact centers, also known as Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), organizations can choose to deploy in a public, private or hybrid cloud. 

• On-premises contact center (no cloud connectivity): An organization owns, manages and acquires all the contact center technology, including agent headsets, licenses, servers and more. This deployment model gives organizations full control of their security but comes with higher upfront costs and significant limitations to the CX.
• Public cloud: A third-party public cloud service provider owns, operates, maintains and delivers an organization's cloud contact center technology for public consumption via the internet. This deployment model requires minimal upfront costs, leverages a pay-for-usage model and enables contact centers to scale and deploy features rapidly.
• Private cloud: Cloud contact center technology is exclusively owned and maintained by an organization in a single-tenant environment. Private clouds can be physically located on-premises in an organization's data center or hosted by a third-party cloud service provider. This deployment model allows organizations to leverage the flexibility and agility of the public cloud while maintaining complete control over their contact center data and security.
• Hybrid cloud: Contact center resources can run across both public and private clouds (including multicloud environments). This model provides organizations with the flexibility to individually select where applications and workloads are located based on their business and IT requirements.

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms

The first step in moving the contact center to the cloud is selecting a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform. While there are hundreds available on the market today, our experts recommend evaluating these leading CCaaS providers: 

• Webex Contact Center: Designed and built from the ground up as a cloud contact center solution, Webex Contact Center brings organizations the innovation, flexibility and agility of the cloud with the security and scalability customers expect from Cisco.
• Genesys: Ranked #1 globally in cloud contact center innovation by Frost & Sullivan, Genesys Cloud CX provides an all-in-one cloud contact center solution for delivering proactive, predictive and hyper-personalized experiences that deepen customer connections.
• Five9: Five9's mission is to transform contact centers into customer engagement centers of excellence, help organizations reimagine their CX and exceed customer expectations.

Contact center technology integrations 

While Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms offer many advanced features and capabilities, many organizations still choose to integrate with other third-party systems and platforms to further enhance the contact center experience and create a true purpose-built contact center solution. Consider exploring these three contact center technology integrations:

• Agent experience and management: Workforce optimization and management platforms, such as Verint, Calabrio and Webex Workforce Optimization, enable your contact center agents to provide the best service by ensuring they are trained, scheduled, rewarded and engaged.
• Contact center operations and management: Performance management software, like IR Prognosis, provides visibility into your contact center and network operations so your IT team can proactively identify and resolve voice, connection, availability and system issues.
• Artificial intelligence (AI): Cloud-based AI platforms, like Google Contact Center AI (CCAI), and robotic process automation (RPA) can deliver advanced capabilities like natural language processing (NLP), chatbots, sentiment analysis and more.

Contact center services

Choosing the right combination of contact center solutions and integrations to provide an effortless customer experience can be challenging. If your organization is struggling to get started or feels stuck on its journey to a cloud-based contact center, we can help. 

From strategy to execution, we offer a comprehensive portfolio of contact center services. Explore all services or get started today by requesting a contact center workshop. In this workshop, we help you align key stakeholders, identify requirements of your contact center solution, reduce the complexity of contact center technology and develop a strategic roadmap for achieving your contact center goals. 

Our work with contact center technologies

Our experts can advise on the leading contact center technologies, platforms, applications and integrations. Explore our case studies to learn how we help customers evaluate, test, implement and adopt contact center technologies to deliver fresh experiences to their customers and agents.