Integrate to accelerate: Why your contact center needs integrations for seamless CX

Apps have taken over our everyday life. Think about it - at work, we have a different app for each function – payroll, HR, learning, etc. Outside, it’s worse! There are hundreds of apps for every single vendor across every industry; entertainment, retail, automobiles, electronics – you name it! Don’t you wish there was a way to view all the apps in just ONE place? Well, this is how your agents may be feeling about your contact center too! 

Contact center agents on average use about 12 tools to go about their day. That’s a lot! Today, there are tools available for every step of customer interaction – from auto dialing voice calls to feedback surveys. While having the best tools for every task is great, having to access each of them separately to get the required information can become tedious for your agents, slowing down your contact center’s day-to-day operations. 

Consolidating the tools and applications your agents use can save costs, speed up operations and improve your contact center’s efficiency significantly. Integrating them so your agents are equipped to serve customers seamlessly, is one foolproof way to deliver great CX. 

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions like, Sprinklr Service, can help you get started on this journey. Sprinklr Service works with your existing tech stack without the need to uproot any of it. So, let’s begin with some basics.  

Integrations – what they are and how they work 

Integrations in a CCaaS platform enable your various systems and tools to work together and exchange data seamlessly. They unify your data and allow teams across engagement, sales, marketing, advertising and customer service to collaborate with ease. 

There are different types of integrations available. The most used are: 

• Out-of-the-box integrations - These are plug-and-play integrations that can be relatively quick to configure. For example, integrating an analytics dashboard or a CRM system. 

• Data import/export integrations - These are primarily ready-to-configure rich data exchange mechanisms that are only used to write or retrieve information. 

• Custom integrations - These integrations can be any business-specific integrations using existing technology and solutions. 

Some of the integrations can simply be used in a ‘plug-and-play’ mode while some may require you to reconfigure or entirely replace your existing tech stack to work. Large enterprises specifically, struggle with reconfiguring existing systems that can cause significant delays in operations, incur higher costs and increase manual effort. Choosing the right integrations to deliver seamless customer experiences while saving time and costs is, therefore, crucial. 

Get the Best of Both Worlds 

The most straightforward approach of an integrations-based customer experience strategy is to adopt a CCaaS platform that stores all your customer data and enables interactions across any channel, all in one place. That said, if you have an existing set of applications and tools that perform separate tasks, this approach may not work.  

Then, what you need is a flexible solution that can work with your existing tech stack as an added layer using integrations. Based on our experience, we designed Sprinklr Service to flexibly integrate with your systems in three different ways. And they are: 

1. Sprinklr platform + external data - In this scenario, the agents use Sprinklr Service to interact with the customers and use your existing systems to fetch and update customer data. The best part about this combination is that your agents can leverage the platform to the fullest. Providing a seamless and consistent experience across all channels becomes effortless.  

2. External platform + Sprinklr data – Here your agents may be using another platform to interact with the customers and the data flows through Sprinklr. What’s more, is that your data coming from the Sprinklr platform is laden with insights.  
   For example, your agents could be using another contact center platform to talk to your customers. Within the agent console, Sprinklr can enable an AI-based chatbot that can assist your agent with smart responses, automated questions, and collecting basic information for the agent to delve into the issue further.  
   With bi-directional connectors, your agents can update and retrieve data from the platform with ease. The details your agent provides after the conversation are stored, and processed to draw insights and arrive at behavior patterns that help your agent offer an extremely personalized experience to the customer each time. All this with minimal or no changes to your existing tech stack. 

3. External platform and data + Sprinklr microservices - Your agents use the platform they always have been using, and the data is sourced from a different system too. You can still leverage Sprinklr Service for its value-added features like conversational AI, voice analytics, reporting dashboards and much more. This way, you can give your contact center a competitive edge with absolutely no changes to your existing framework. 
   

Sprinklr’s platform works as an added layer of intelligence that works beyond the hurdles of point-solution chaos giving you the best of both worlds in all combinations. 

Assess your Appetite for CX Success  

Now that you know which approach works best for your contact center, it’s time to determine the path and extent of integrations you need based on the contact center’s current maturity level. 

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered there as well. 

Contact centers vary greatly in their readiness to adopt integrations based on multiple factors. There are four major aspects to consider before you think of adopting an integrated CX strategy. 

The four factors being: 

1. Strategy – How do you think technology integrations will help your brand?  

2. Business Readiness – Do integrations align with the CX vision for the future? 

3. IT Readiness – Is your IT infrastructure ready to streamline and scale with integrations? 

4. Stakeholder Alignment – Do all internal stakeholders see its potential benefits and set the required processes to work well? 

We have designed a simple tool for you that helps you to get answers to these questions and evaluate your maturity in this journey. A maturity assessment that categorizes your readiness into five levels, tells you what the next level is, and guides you to get there. 

The goal of the assessment is for you to empower your contact center with flexible, cutting-edge integrations to get the best out of your existing applications and tools. We hope the outcome helps you chart a path to the integrations you need, to make seamless CX and improved agent efficiency a reality. 

Get in touch with me or our team of experts to begin your assessment today. 

Explore how Sprinklr Service can contribute to this journey. Book a demo now.