The gap between digital and voice capabilities persist

Most business leaders and digital transformation executives I have met over the past year recognize the gap between their digital engagement capabilities and traditional voice infrastructure as a huge bottleneck in implementing omnichannel. They realize the importance of bridging this gap because even as digital channels grow, voice continues to be a significant and effective channel for customer engagement. It’s not surprising that as businesses actively consolidate their voice infrastructure with an IP-based tech stack refresh (one of the top trends in the contact center marketplace, according to Gartner), they want to seamlessly turn on omnichannel to leverage their voice-based operational best practices. Unfortunately, given the current technology landscape, this digital divide persists for most enterprises except those who invest heavily in internal technology development.

Over the next few years, businesses will sink or swim depending on how easy they make it for customers to do business with them. Providing easy omnichannel customer engagement is not optional, it is vital. This imperative can only be served with a unified platform because naturally compounding operational complexity overwhelms attempts to stitch together point solutions. Imagine the complexity for a large organization that is trying to deliver omnichannel as a shared service across some common variations of its customer contact operations:

• Agent sites and time zones
• In-sourced versus out-sourced teams
• Lines of business
• Channels of customer contact
• Vendor products (multiple providers for different point capabilities like voice routing, IVR, web self-service, email, chat, mobile, etc.)
• Service delivery models (on-premise versus cloud)
• Product lines

We reimagine digital simplicity

As Rex says in his blog post, our combined voice management and digital engagement platform will set the bar for easy omnichannel engagement. We bring together Exony’s market leading capability in voice-based contact center management (extended to other channels), reporting (secure, extensible, business friendly), and analytics (journey optimization) alongside eGain’s digital channels (best in class) and knowledge management (powered by guided interactivity). Partnering with core contact center technology providers like Cisco (both eGain and Exony are successful Cisco partners), we will:

• Deliver a connected cloud-based platform for businesses to pilot, prove, and scale innovative customer engagement strategies.
• Unify voice and digital engagement across the enterprise, extending beyond the contact center into branches and store networks, easily leveraging enterprise experts when needed.
• Unleash the creativity of clients who will be able to dynamically match agents (based on their current performance, not their historic assessment) to client needs (based on their omnichannel behavior, intent and implied value, not just their historic status in the CRM database).
• Help digital agenda owners point to the increment benefits delivered by their investments, not just play into a mindless arms race to keep up with competitors in terms of omnichannel capabilities.
• Empower end customers to serve themselves across channels, confident in the knowledge that they will not be trapped in self-service “black holes” or subjected to “groundhog day” questions from agents if they should need human assistance.

Today we embark on the next big inning of innovation of our customer engagement hub—to deliver an omnichannel platform with best-in-class collaboration, knowledge, management, and analytics. It will be an exciting and rewarding journey for our team as we help clients strengthen their brands by taking the effort out of omnichannel.