No matter the business goals, a good customer experience (CX) is always a top priority—and that means deploying the right contact center infrastructure. Advanced contact center technology—such as voice authentication, digital self-service tools and call recording—can help make this possible, especially when supported by a robust contact center infrastructure.
When deployed correctly and supported by a 5G network, advanced contact center features can improve the customer experience and help build organizational buy-in for adopting innovative contact center technology solutions.
Advanced call and contact center technology helps improve the customer experience
Voice authentication is an advanced contact center feature that can help businesses prevent fraud and improve contact center security. Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, contact center software can compare a caller's voice with a stored biometric and verify that the person on the line is who they say they are. By proactively authenticating customer calls, financial institutions could prevent fraudulent transactions, increase customer trust and improve regulatory compliance.
Contact center technology has also evolved to include better digital self-service options. Rather than waiting on hold for a human contact center agent to become available, a customer can get instant help from a virtual agent, an automated, AI-powered digital assistant. Customers can initiate conversations with virtual agents using their channel of choice—whether that's over the phone or through an app, website or messaging app—and get the information they need quickly. And by tapping knowledge bases and business data, virtual agents can help customers resolve their own requests. Live agents would be free to deal with more complicated issues, and businesses could leverage virtual agents as part of an effective customer engagement strategy.
Continual improvement is key to delivering a satisfying customer experience. Businesses that deliver a winning customer experience regularly review contact center analytics to identify opportunities for improvement. They know that customer call data is rich with insight, but it is difficult to analyze customers' voice interactions with contact center agents or interactive voice response systems at scale. Businesses can do this by recording customer calls (with customer permission) and using the language-processing capabilities in their contact center software to transcribe those calls for further analysis. This way, businesses can better understand their customers' needs, gauge customer satisfaction levels, evaluate contact center agent performance and identify new market opportunities.
How 5G could support advanced contact center technology and infrastructure
An exceptional customer experience needs more than the right contact center technology—it needs a robust network, too. Your business could have the most sophisticated contact center features available, but they will not mean a thing if your call quality is patchy or if a connection suddenly drops.
5G network slicing can play a critical role in supporting your contact infrastructure by ensuring smooth and efficient customer conversations. Rather than trying to provide a top-notch customer experience across a one-size-fits-all broadband connection not configured with the contact center in mind, businesses can proactively design a 5G network slice expressly for that mission-critical business function.
Businesses can also use network slicing to create virtual broadband network partitions for contact centers and other business applications. They could automatically optimize the network resources they allocate to each network slice—tailoring service-level agreements and performance standards to ensure a high-quality customer experience, for example. They could also create a slice devoted to implementing security and compliance policies to protect sensitive data.
Network slicing becomes even more critical as businesses add advanced features to their contact center technology. "Each new added feature to a contact center, such as recording and transcription services that feed analytics, increases the demand for bandwidth that is equal to the original call," GovTech says.
In other words, you will need a better network, if your network is private, or you will need greater access to the rich menu of 5G network services as you take advantage of technology that improves the customer experience—and you will need a plan to optimize your network infrastructure to support innovation.
Building buy-in for advanced contact center infrastructure
Building organizational buy-in is essential when adopting advanced contact center infrastructure. Some business leaders might think that contact center enhancements and 5G network slicing will not generate a return on the investment. But customer experience improvements can indirectly boost the bottom line by improving customer satisfaction and competitive position. Your case will be stronger if you partner with the customer experience team and design your project to exceed customer experience goals.
There's another kind of partner that can help you communicate the business benefits of modern contact center infrastructure to business decision-makers, too: a managed services provider. A managed service provider can do more than help you craft a comprehensive plan for implementing 5G services that enable contact center innovation; they can show you how similar organizations have benefited from this powerful digital transformation. With an experienced implementation partner in your corner, you can deliver powerful customer experience advancements that drive your business forward while laying a strong foundation for innovation.
Discover how Verizon's 5G solutions can help transform your customer experience.