Enabling legacy systems for the digital age

In the last 5 years, Customer Experience experts have told companies they must delight their customers whether they use social media, email, voice, web-chat, or any of the many communication methods available today. 

Customers are expecting you to know who they are regardless of the channel used and you should already know what they're about to ask, but we've learned that the more channels you handle the more tools you need and customer data might get lost along the way. That's why we started to think about connecting all these multiple ways of communicating sharing the same data sources across any platform, even between different vendor solutions. 

Until recently the only way to link the systems needed to achieve this uniform multichannel experience was by replacing older independent databases, telephony, chat, and associated systems that companies had grown to rely on, with one solution that covered it all. Of course, this becomes a very complex project with multiple systems and workflows impacted. We found this complexity and cost were often enough to stop a push to omnichannel before it started. 

This is why Transcom has focused on removing this complexity and developed a solution that can link these legacy systems to simply allow customers to move between channels, and the systems to share the customers' data and history with a universal front end for the agent. This allows a more controlled integration of different channels and removes the need for full system replacement. By having experts in APIs, microservices, conversational AI, and contact center applications, we see that this can often be designed and developed within the existing contact center solution without involving traditional IT and system integrators. The timeline and effort become more agile and the result becomes more on the point. However, it requires the right type of skills and technology enablers.

T:Connect can connect separated contact and data systems to work as a unified solution, making connected customer journeys much more accessible. A new workflow engine sits centrally connecting applications and sharing customer data from the CRM system between them. When the customer is moved to a new channel, the new agent (either human or automated) has all the context of the query being made so no repetition is needed. T:Connect can be customized to work with virtually any vendor's communication tools, linking previously separated channels into a seamless experience.

Transcom can enable your existing internal systems to talk to each other, and also enhance your offering by bolting on any channels such as chat, social media, voice & chatbots (using natural language processing or NLP), and even the internet of things. These can all be enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) helping to automate simpler queries and transactions ensuring any human agents are only needed for the more complex tasks so increasing the value provided by more expensive resources.

Transcom believes contacts should be both seamless and effortless and come to a resolution in the shortest time possible with the right result. We can help you achieve this with your existing invested systems using T: Connect to create new customer journeys for better customer experiences while unified queuing and a single agent user interface can improve the contact center productivity. This transformation allows the contact center operations to seamlessly continue while CX enhancements and operational performance are implemented in a highly focused operation and with the minimum of disruption, so seamless customer journeys can suddenly become much more achievable for any company.

 

Written by John Bevan, Director Global Telephony at Transcom