In a business landscape that’s increasingly defined by digital interactions, modern cloud-based contact centers have become an important tool for enhancing experiences and customer loyalty.

Cloud-based contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) technology enables organizations to resolve problems quickly, identify and act upon follow-on sales opportunities, and improve net promoter scores. Kyndryl is helping its customers modernize their contact centers and deploy CCaaS in business situations such as supporting consumer interactions and for IT support/help desk solutions.

Here are six innovations Kyndryl incorporates into its CCaaS solutions that can improve customer and contact center agent experiences and boost your bottom line.

1. Intelligent routing sends callers to the most appropriate agent, based on their caller ID information or answers they provided to a few preliminary questions; intelligent queuing/callback addresses a major source of customer frustration: waiting on hold. “Time is precious. Customers want to quickly reach the right resource to solve their problem,” says Donna Chiaramonte, director, global center of competency, for Kyndryl’s Digital Workplace Global Practice.

2. Work-from-anywhere scheduling efficiency has made physical call center operations a thing of the past. Today’s modern cloud-based contact centers are staffed almost entirely by home-based workers. Agents can be located anywhere in the world and brought online as needed, ensuring that the necessary resources can quickly attend to customer needs.

3. AI-enabled chatbots are well equipped — and eventually they will handle 75% to 95% of customer inquiries. That’s a virtue for the majority of customers who want quick answers to their questions without picking up the phone. And they’re not only for customers – agents can also use chatbots to quickly answer customer questions and solve problems. Chatbots also have huge potential cost-saving benefits compared to human operators. Knowledge management also comes into play, enabling organizations to mine their response data to quickly adapt and improve interaction between customers and AI-enabled chatbots.

4. Call recording and transcription analytics have across-the-board benefits ranging from agent training to effective upselling. Machine-learning-based transcription/analysis scans the content of customer interactions, looking for opportunities to improve service or generate sales. AI can also spot effective tactics agents use and flag them for sharing across the organization. This also enables call center leadership to spend less time listening and/or rating recordings and more time focused on improving agent (employee) experience, which, in turn, helps drive retention.

5. AI-enabled real-time monitoring/escalation provides immediate awareness of agent/customer interactions, helping call center leaders quickly identify areas where they can assist. They can pass written advice to agents in real time or intervene directly if needed to retain an at-risk customer.

6. Real-time view of customer profiles is made possible by integrating CCaaS solutions with customer applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems. This gives agents a comprehensive view of a customer’s history and preferences, in turn reducing time-to-resolution.

For IT support contact centers, Kyndryl’s contact center solution uses profiles and live connections to a caller’s IT equipment to address problems before a call even begins.

“We know the customer’s name, what language they speak, the history of their ticket, whether the device they’re using has been rebooted recently, and what patches have been applied,” says Chris Hardy, enterprise architect, Kyndryl Digital Workplace Global Practice. “We haven’t spoken to the customer, but we already know what their problem is.”

No one likes waiting on hold or traversing menu trees. The secret of successful contact centers is the experience they can create. “It’s all about providing elevated experiences that are personalized and seamless for the end customer and the contact center agent,” Chiaramonte says.

To learn more about Kyndryl’s CCaaS offering, click here.