The contact center has undergone a massive transformation. It is no longer a single office location where support agents only field telephone calls from customers. The modern contact center spans locations. It has a multitude of channels (from web chat to WhatsApp to video). And there’s growing demand for more expertise and experience as agents deal with increasingly complex customer inquiries.

Within this environment, enhancing your contact center’s customer experience (CX) program can be difficult. It requires improved collaboration, better connectivity, and the ability to share data and expertise across the organization.

If you can get this right, your organization can benefit significantly. Forrester research shows organizations that enhance their customer experience to a ‘customer-obsessed’ level see 1.8 times revenue growth and twice as much market share.

Taking a single platform approach and enhancing context for agents

Throughout the organization, communication and collaboration are key. There is no reason for this to stop at the contact center. Customer-facing employees need connectivity to the rest of the organization. According to Gartner, 82% of customer service leaders believe internal collaboration is one of the most important tools for the future of customer experience. Without it, CX enhancements won’t succeed.

To achieve this, companies may think about adding new communication channels to their existing solution. But this isn’t enough for the new levels of connectivity required in the modern contact center. The changing landscape now demands a platform-based approach to contact center and unified communications. By using one platform for contact center, voice, video, and chat, organizations can significantly increase internal connectivity and give every employee the capabilities they need to succeed.

Alongside better connectivity, improved context can also dramatically improve CX. Agents speak to many customers every day, often several at a time. Because of this, they need quick and reliable access to the most-used tools and customer information. By using a single workspace with streamlined navigation, screen pops, and customized integrations, agents can get at-a-glance context to help them understand and cater to customers’ needs. Two-thirds of CX leaders say screen pops are vital to customer service agents’ roles. Thanks to advancements in AI, real-time agent assistance through screen pops is helping organizations see a 17% increase in revenue too.

Removing silos and the rising demand for expertise

Organizational silos are one of the biggest barriers to delivering an exceptional customer experience. When these silos are erased, both the customer and employee experience improves. This is particularly true when it comes to data and customer insights shared within and outside of the contact center. New analytical tools are providing contact center agents deeper insights into their customers’ behaviors. This data can be shared between agents, but also with other customer-facing employees such as sales and customer success, to help them tailor their interactions to their customers’ needs. What’s more, supervisors can harness the data for training and quality assurance.

As well as removing data silos, breaking down barriers between experts is essential to improving customer experience as the need for expertise within the contact center and outside of it never diminishes. Research has shown that 55% of organizations say they’re aiming to hire more expert agents. This is for several reasons, such as introducing new products and features (48%) and boosting customer ratings (42%).

Hiring new expertise isn’t the only option. Organizations with existing in-house subject matter experts (SMEs) can also boost internal collaboration and overall customer satisfaction. Giving contact center agents efficient and immediate access to subject matter experts (SME) is a faster and more cost-efficient way to inject more expertise into your customer-facing operations. Using a tool like 8x8’s Expert Finder, contact center agents can quickly connect to SMEs throughout your organization. It enables them to request information or bring an SME into a call or chat with a customer.

By removing silos between data and personnel, and providing enterprise-wide connectivity, organizations can boost the customer experience within their contact centers. Agents become more empowered in their roles, with readily reliable data and SME connections, leading to customer-obsessed levels of ROI in market share and revenue growth.

Learn more about the platform approach to contact center and unified communications here.