Assessing digital maturity for your next-gen cloud contact center

Highlights

• An integrated next-gen cloud contact center is the best solution for bridging the gap between your enterprise and the modern-day customer.
• Successful cloud contact center implementation requires a strategy that defines your current state of digitization and elaborates the steps needed to achieve optimum digital maturity.
• You can assess your digital maturity level by reviewing the progress you have made in offering satisfactory customer experiences, upholding agent productivity, and developing a digital-first overall business strategy.

Customer service has never been more critical than it is today. Fueled by technological advancements and a culture of instant gratification, market expectations have evolved dramatically. To attract and retain customers, businesses must look beyond traditional strategies like offering more options and lowering prices, and build robust customer service strategies.

Because of the numerous communication options at a customer’s disposal and the vast amount of data involved, the modern-day business has no choice but to adopt a digital-first customer service approach. An integrated next-gen cloud contact center is the best solution for bridging the gap between your enterprise and customers because it offers all the tools, access, and flexibility necessary to engage buyers effectively without requiring extensive, costly implementation.

Transitioning to a cloud contact center can be challenging, especially if you have been using traditional methods for a long time. Fortunately, you can tackle the hurdles easily by first assessing your current state of digital maturity.

This article covers:

• The importance of a digital maturity model
• How to assess your current state of digital maturity
• How RingCentral can help you achieve contact center digital maturity

The importance of a digital maturity model for contact center transformation

Deploying a cloud contact center is much more than just investing in the cloud contact software. For successful implementation, you must have a strategy that defines your current position and elaborates the steps needed to complete execution.

A digital maturity model helps you know where to start when shifting to a cloud-based contact center solution. It reveals your current capability level – basic, standard, advanced, or optimized – and enables you to determine where to focus your efforts to progress to the next level.

How can you assess your current state of digital maturity?

A digital maturity assessment helps you understand where you are and develop an approach that builds on your strengths and adequately addresses your weaknesses.

RingCentral provides a digital maturity assessment tool to help contact centers see where they fall on the maturity spectrum. To evaluate your contact center digital maturity, you can take this handy quiz. Once you complete the quiz, you’ll get a personalized report with actionable insights and recommendations on how to evolve your strategy. Plus the report will tell you how your CX strategy stacks up against peers in your industry.

Here are some of the factors the assessment tool takes into account to give you insightful recommendations:

• Customer experience
• Agent productivity
• Overall strategy

Let’s extrapolate these factors below.

Customer experience

In today’s overly digitized market, a stellar customer experience can be an excellent indicator of digital maturity. How are you providing personalized, intelligent, and intuitive experiences? Is the engagement quality consistent from one channel to the other? How fast are you solving customer issues? Comprehensively answering these questions can reveal customer experience gaps and whether they stem from inadequate digital tools and capabilities.

To determine your customer experience maturity, consider five critical customer-facing metrics:

• Self-service options: The tools you provide for customers to solve common and relatively simple problems themselves instead of waiting on hold for an agent
• Omnichannel flexibility: The ability of your agents to interact with customers on their preferred channel with quick responses and personalized experiences
• First contact resolution rate: The effectiveness of your contact center to resolve customer problems with a single contact instead of multiple sessions that can frustrate customers and decrease satisfaction
• Frictionless interactions: Your ability to deliver seamless, satisfying experiences across different agents and channels
• Customer satisfaction: Your effectiveness at evaluating your contact center’s performance with customers in comparison to your competition.

Agent productivity

Measuring your agents’ productivity can help you identify shortcomings in skill, knowledge, tools, and access and take proper measures, such as investing in comprehensive, collaborative cloud contact software, reviewing data access policies, reinforcing digital security, and enhancing coaching and feedback processes.

Below are six metrics that define digital maturity from an agent productivity perspective.

• Agent tools: Whether agents have the solutions required to meet customers on their preferred channels, access the data they need in real time, and deliver reliable, effective, and secure interactions
• Agent hiring and onboarding: How quickly and easily new agents get up and running (This metric is typically determined by the intuitiveness and simplicity level of your contact center solutions and the HR-centric structures you have to ensure seamless onboarding.)
• Supervisor tools: How well you use digital management tools to monitor and log agent-customer interactions for continuous improvement and effective rewarding
• Workforce optimization: Whether you have management tools that establish and optimize agent allocations, schedules, and coverage to minimize idle time and churn while maintaining a satisfied and motivated workforce
• Collaboration with experts: The tools and capabilities you provide for your agents to collaborate with other team members across the organization to quickly resolve customer issues
• Open API integration: Whether you have APIs that can seamlessly integrate your contact center platform to other business apps and workflows to facilitate end-to-end access and automation

Overall strategy

The most successful cloud contact centers are deployed with a strategy that is supported by the entire business. Therefore, you can determine your current digital maturity level by assessing whether your organization’s overall strategy views digitization as essential to growth, profitability, and competitiveness.

These six metrics define whether your overall business strategy demonstrates digital maturity.

• Contact center growth plans: Whether your overall strategy prioritizes contact center transformation requirements like cloud migration and future-proof integration
• Contact center as a profit center: Whether your strategy considers steps to advance your contact center from a cost center to a profit center through efficiency and productivity improvements
• Contact center costs: How your strategy accounts for the costs of deploying and managing a cloud contact center and related infrastructure
• Support for WFH operations: Whether your strategy incorporates support for remote agents through next-gen contact center solutions ideal for the new normal
• Innovation with new-age technologies: How your strategy addresses emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning and their increasingly critical roles in cloud contact centers
• Security: Whether your strategy prioritizes developing measures that protect customer data and maintain compliance

Achieve contact center digital maturity with RingCentral

Assessing digital maturity is the first step toward successfully transitioning to a next-generation cloud contact center. With a proper understanding of your starting point, you can define your picture of success and the moves you will make to achieve it.

RingCentral is the leading provider of comprehensive, tailored solutions for cloud contact centers. Our global cloud contact platform integrates an array of customer contact options, productivity and collaborative tools, and data management solutions to ensure your agents are fully equipped to deliver superior customer experiences and maintain high-level productivity. Moreover, our solutions offer unmatched cost-saving and scalability capabilities and are the ideal tools for pushing the cloud contact center agenda to top-level management as a business strategy.

Want to know more about how you can transform your organization with RingCentral’s next-gen cloud contact center? Download RingCentral’s Special Edition eBook: Next-Gen Cloud Contact Centers for Dummies today.

Originally published Jan 12, 2022, updated Dec 30, 2022