| | JULY 20178CIOReviewcontact center design. Personas represent core customer groups, containing basic demographic information, desired customer outcomes, key pain points and their wants/needs, as well as a name, face, and quote to help bring them to life. This information builds empathy, especially for groups, like IT, that might never see the customer. Personas also can be used to better understand CSRs and why they require certain capabilities to succeed in their job. CJMs are visual depictions of key interaction points across the customer lifecycle from a persona's perspective. They provide understandings of how customers interact with the organization across key channels and with people in critical points of the journey that might never touch the contact center, such as when a customer calls the contact centers because they can't find information on the website. To support its objectives, the contact center of the future must deliver an omni-channel experience, enabling customers to self-serve, as well as access services and information for their preferred touch points, such as voice, email, chat, and mobile.A number of advanced technologies are now being adopted by contact centers to help organizations improve personalization and make it quicker and easier for customers to get the answers they need. These include:·Cloud--The cloud is dramatically transforming the contact center ecosystem by enabling organizations to quickly and cost-effectively scale to meet changing demand. In addition, by moving contact center operations to the cloud, organizations can sustain a fully redundant system to support 24/7 operations, eliminating outages and shut downs caused by routine maintenance, systems issues or updates. The distributive nature of the cloud also helps contact center managers address staffing challenges. Contact center staff can be located anywhere and work anytime, which assists in determining where to place resources and providing better business continuity and operational efficiencies. · Analytics--Historically, contact center metrics focused on how long it took a representative to answer a call, how long callers waited on hold, what the abandon rate was, and the length of the interaction time. Now organizations must consider The Contact Center of the Future: Embracing Culture and Advanced Technologies to Enhance Customer ExperienceBy Jeff Beelman, Contact Center Solution Architect, General Dynamics Information Technology [NYSC: GD]Calling a company's customer service line might require navigating a series of cumbersome questions by pushing numbers on phones, repeating answers that voice recognition technology doesn't understand, or not being able to connect with a human, who can help with your request.These encounters are why customer experience initiatives are on the mind of CEOs and CIOs across the country. They understand that delivering a better customer experience, and reducing customer effort, will minimize customer frustrations, improve retention rates, drive loyalty, and ensure more efficient use of their contact center resources.Organizations should align people, processes, and technology and drive the design of the contact center around customer needs, wants, and expectations. Making these changes and understanding your customer and how they want to do business, employee adoption will increase and customers will be less frustrated.The key is for organizations to develop the right technology and processes to support success of Customer Service Representatives (CSR). These changes cannot be siloed in contact center operations but should be applied across the enterprise­from contact center operations to sales, marketing and IT­to create a seamless, consistent experience across the organization. Development of personas and Customer Journey Maps (CJM) are keys to IN MY OPINIONJeff Beelman
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