Cloud Resources: CDW, in partnership with leading cloud providers, offers scalable and flexible cloud solutions that meet the unique demands of each company’s contact center environment. By migrating their contact centers to the cloud, organizations can rapidly scale resources up and down to meet changing demands — an important consideration for businesses in highly seasonal sectors such as retail, where call volumes can vary greatly depending on the time of year. A move to the cloud can also improve reliability and uptime while reducing the management and maintenance burden for internal IT staff.

Omnichannel Platforms: Customers expect to be able to interact with companies across a variety of channels. However, business and IT leaders too often claim to support omnichannel platforms when their environments are merely multichannel — meaning that channels such as voice, text, email and video are not fully integrated with one another. A poor omnichannel experience can be worse than not offering multiple channels at all: Customers will quickly become frustrated if they’re forced to repeat information every time they switch from one channel to another. These customers will often revert to voice, which is a comparatively complex and expensive channel to support.

Managed Services: By engaging a trusted third-party partner such as CDW, companies can offload many of the time-consuming tasks that are needed to provide an excellent customer experience. CDW’s managed services offerings cover the full range of IT solutions, including services around data, development, infrastructure, workspace, security and support. By strategically delegating tasks to a trusted partner, organizations can free up their staff and managers to focus on their primary objectives, without the distractions that come with supporting all aspects of their increasingly complex IT environments. With CDW providing back-end management, internal business and IT leaders can ensure that customer-facing services are efficient and reliable.

Hyper-Personalization: Even outside the contact center, AI tools can deliver insights that allow companies to provide personalized messaging and interactions that simply were not possible just a few years ago. Sophisticated AI tools trawl information gleaned from thousands of customer interactions — including browsing and purchase history, social media interactions, demographic trends, previous customer service interactions and customer survey data — to target customers with timely, hyper-personalized offers. According to one survey, more than half of customers (52 percent) now expect offers from brands to always be personalized.

Staff Retention: Employee burnout is a huge problem in the contact center. When customer service agents are beset by unpredictable peaks in traffic and unhappy customers, they are more likely to leave — which only exacerbates customer service backlogs. Because AI tools can scale up to meet demand and provide agents with the contextual information to excel in their roles, these solutions are having a significant impact on employee satisfaction. By handing off routine customer queries to AI agents, companies can also strategically redeploy human representatives to more complex channels such as social media, potentially providing avenues for career advancement.

Sustainability: More and more, customers expect the brands they do business with to show a commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainable operations. In some studies, nearly 80 percent of consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them. AI tools can help organizations enhance their sustainability initiatives, uncovering insights that lead to optimized resource use and more efficient operations. For instance, AI can dramatically reduce energy consumption in data centers through advanced algorithms that predict peak load times and adjust energy use accordingly. This not only cuts costs, but it also helps companies achieve the sustainability goals that their customers value.