Originally published by Five9:
Your C-suite has aggressive plans to grow sales, service standards, customer satisfaction, and your company's bottom line. Keeping ahead of their expectations requires keeping your eye on today's trends in technology and operational strategy.  

Here are four modern contact center pain points that may be limiting your success, along with proactive recommendations that will help take your operation to the next level:

Pain Point #1: Technology is changing faster than ever

The speed of modern platform development has increased rapidly. Today, contact center operators expect multiple software upgrades annually, not once every year or two. This has increased demands and costs for IT departments that manage on-premise solutions, as they face more staff overtime to work around peak call times while troubleshooting the upgrade's effect on app integrations. 

Recommendation:  Stay modern. Consider cloud solutions for your CRM, Contact Center and WFM operations. With cloud solutions, your agents always have the most current software with minimal impact to IT. The best cloud solution providers offer pre-integrated CRM and WFM apps, open APIs, and top-notch professional services for rapid customizations.

Pain Point #2: Agent capacity is not aligned with elastic demand

Swings in customer contact volume can be due to a variety of factors that cause demand to surge or plunge. Nothing limits customer service like long queue times--but paying for excess seats damages your bottom line.

Recommendation:  Move beyond the fixed license pricing of on-premise solutions and consider a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution with on-demand scalability to gain ultimate flexibility with pay-as-you-go agent capacity.

Pain Point #3: Customer contact channels are limited

Centers that handle only inbound calls are far less cost-efficient than those that support outbound dialing. Beyond voice, to excel in today's marketplace, agents must move fluidly from one communications channel to another and be available to consumers on their time schedule.

Recommendation:  Cross-train agents to handle so they can move comfortably from a slow channel to one of higher activity. Realize, however, that social media is a public forum; let your proven veterans take the lead here, and your brand will shine.  Make sure you're monitoring your workload forecasting on all channels, not just voice, so you'll never miss an opportunity to delight a customer.

Pain Point #4: Metrics are not real-time or consolidated

Business moves at the speed of information, and delayed stats can delay your responsiveness. Creating unified reports across hybrid and multi-site centers is complicated by even slight differences in technology stacks, making custom queries a nightmare.

Recommendation:  Keep reports flowing with a consolidated cloud database that unifies all contact center sites and remote agents in real time. If working with hybrid or multi-site centers you'll want to standardize terms, acronyms and report structures as much as possible.  Review the KPIs you're currently tracking and consider adding new metrics if you see gaps in your business intelligence.

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