Omnichannel telephony and contact center with AI

Customer Relations and Customer Service Departments ask us their key questions to improve operational efficiency, sales and customer experience.

Operational efficiency

• How can we improve agent productivity and efficiency, particularly for low value-added tasks?
• How can we optimize the omnichannel, seamless management of incoming call flows?
• How can agent performance be measured, analyzed and managed?

Improving sales

• How can we improve the conversion rate of outbound calls to leads generated by marketing and digital teams?
• How can we optimize and industrialize outbound call campaigns?
• How can we optimize customer retention and exploit cross-sell and up-sell opportunities?

Improving the customer experience

• How can we offer a seamless customer journey?
• How can we offer personalized customer service?
• How can we improve the quality of customer interactions?

An emerging trend in the market for the past several years has been the move from a call center focused solely on phone calls, to an omnichannel contact center, perfectly integrated with digital channels.

Solutions that enable this shift offer a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) subscription model, and are therefore called CCaaS for Contact Center as a Service.

Operational efficiency gains

• Silo-free omnichannel management (calls, SMS, emails, voicebot, chat, chatbot, customer area, applications, social networks) of incoming flows
• Automatic generation of optimized customer contact forecasts and schedules
• Native integration with CRM
• Centralized omnichannel monitoring and reporting of customer service activity

Sales improvement benefits

• Automatic prioritization of outbound calls according to lead value and probability of conversion
• Programming call rules to contact prospects at times that maximize reachability
• Automatic assignment of calls to agents according to their skills and availability
• Automatic call dialing and automatic detection of answering machines to increase agent productivity and customer pick-up rates.

Improving customer experience 

• Implementation of an IVR with natural language understanding
• Integration of chatbots and voicebots powered by AI and generative AI that identify customers and process their queries
• Use of generative AI for interaction synthesis, service quality analysis and real-time agent support

Sia Partners has developed maturity analysis grids for call centers and omnichannel contact centers, covering functional, technical, organizational and contractual aspects.

We found that:

• 92% of Customer Relations Departments use limited or siloed contact center tools (maturity levels 1 or 2), only 8% use modern, omnichannel solutions (maturity level 3).
• Among departments with less mature tools, 80% plan to invest in modern, omnichannel solutions.

Sia Partners has assisted several Customer Relations Departments with their contact center solution projects:

• A French energy supplier: support in managing the deployment of a contact center solution
• An energy distributor: diagnostics, tool selection and change management support
• A B2B service provider: preparation of a call for tenders for the selection of a new contact center solution.

For these companies, the implementation of a contact center solution has benefited customers, the company, supervisors and agents alike:

• 18% increase in agent productivity, thanks to the automation of manual data-entry tasks, better integration with CRM and AI support.
• Increase in service quality from 80% to 90%, thanks to omnichannel orchestration of incoming contacts, and overflow and callback strategies.
• +5pts in customer satisfaction, thanks to a better first-contact resolution rate and continuous improvement enabled by agent quality and performance management.
• +5% in sales, thanks to a higher conversion rate into purchases, with optimal industrialization of outgoing call campaigns, improved customer retention and better handling of leads by the customer service department.

We studied the CCaaS solutions offered by 20 vendors, the proportion of these solutions that offer each module of an omnichannel contact center, and the proportion that offer AI-related functionality on each module.

Vendors surveyed include Odigo, Genesys, Diabolocom, Kiamo, Aircall, Ringover, Avaya, Vocalcom, RingCentral, Sprinklr Service, NICE CX One, Alcatel Contact Center, Cisco Webex Contact Center, Amazon Connect, Zoom Contact Center and Google Contact Center AI.

Highlights of the benchmark:

• AI has been extended to all contact center functionalities to assist agents and even respond autonomously to customers.
• Not all solutions offer complementary modules, such as Quality Monitoring or Workforce Management.
• Two scenarios are therefore conceivable: either a combination of state-of-the-art tools to meet business needs, or an all-in-one tool.
• Sia Partners assists its customers in choosing the most appropriate scenario and solution, according to their business challenges and their technical and organizational context.

Contact us for a complete presentation of the omnichannel contact center solutions benchmark.

Sia Partners has developed expertise in issues faced by Customer Relations Centers. Depending on your needs, our consultants can support you at every stage of your project to implement, change or replace telephony, call center or omnichannel contact center tools.

From the very outset of your project:

• Flash diagnosis of your level of functional, technical, organizational and contractual maturity; opportunity study on the relevance of an omnichannel contact center solution and identification of quick wins.
• Benchmark best practices in customer relations organization and tools.
• Definition of your target operating model for your customer relations center and co-construction of the project roadmap: organization, processes, tools and governance at local and central level.

During the design phase:

• Specification and expression of business needs for your Sales and Customer Service teams. Functional and application mapping, selection of AI and generative AI-based features with high added value according to your needs.
• Preparation and animation of RFPs (RFI, RFP) for a software publisher and integrator.
• Selection of the best contact center solution to meet your business needs, and organizational and technical constraints.

Throughout the development and implementation of the target operational model:

• Project management, coordination of the editor, integrator and your business and IT teams, preparation of a pilot, and industrialization of the deployment of the target customer relations model and its tools.
• Change management to secure the adoption and the value generated by the new tool, with training sessions targeted by staff profiles at head office and in your Customer Relations Centers.