Migrating to a cloud-delivered Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution can revolutionize how your organization delivers customer service. However, this transition requires careful planning and execution to avoid disruptions. Assuming you have selected a CCaaS platform that aligns with your organizational needs, the following best practices outline key considerations for a seamless migration.

A successful migration to CCaaS not only enhances operational efficiency and scalability but also ensures a significant improvement in service delivery, directly impacting customer satisfaction and retention. Organizations should consider the risks of not embracing modern cloud-based customer care solutions, which can

include diminished customer service capabilities and potential costs due to outdated or inflexible systems. Moreover, organizations that delay this shift risk falling behind competitors who can adapt more quickly to market demands and customer needs. Thus, embarking on a well-planned migration journey is imperative for companies aiming to optimize their customer care operations and secure a competitive advantage in their respective markets.

1. Physical Infrastructure Migration

Understanding your current environment is critical for a successful transition. Start with a thorough site review to document the infrastructure and identify unique user requirements. Engage with call center managers, team leaders, and power users to uncover specific needs and configured features such as whisper settings, omnichannel components, call management, etc.

Factors such as bandwidth and latency are paramount for seamless operations. Evaluate your facility’s connectivity for both on-site and remote users, ensuring it aligns with the CCaaS product requirements. Fortunately, modern CCaaS solutions such as Amazon Connect, Twilio Flex and Five9 supply agent connectivity tools to verify that workers have sufficient resources to provide good customer service over various channels.

Additionally, document call treatments and station-specific configurations like call coverage paths. Legacy components requiring continued functionality should be cataloged to prepare for integration.

2. Change Management Planning

Change management is essential to mitigate risks and maximize adoption. A staged cutover strategy is recommended over a single-event migration, allowing for gradual testing and adjustments.

Develop a robust testing strategy to validate the platform’s performance under real-world conditions. Complement this with an organizational enablement strategy to train users and ensure they are comfortable with the new system. Adoption by your business units and users is one of the most critical factors which will determine the success of your CCaaS migration.

3. Operational Considerations

Operational continuity is vital during migration. Start by understanding the reporting requirements for business managers to ensure no loss of visibility into critical metrics. Additionally, review monitoring processes to maintain visibility into system performance post-migration.

4. Integration Planning

Integrating legacy infrastructure with the new CCaaS platform can present significant challenges. Document existing components, including FXO/FXS interfaces, Workforce Management solutions, FAX systems, wallboards, and specialty dialers. Verify that integrations comply with any regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA or FINRA.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems often require specific integrations with local data sources or enterprise middleware. Assess these integrations to ensure call flows function as intended. For specialized applications, verify that they meet operational needs within the new environment.

5. Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery

Testing fault tolerance and disaster recovery capabilities are critical steps in any CCaaS migration. Develop and execute a failsafe testing plan to ensure resilience against both premise-level and carrier-level failures. It is important to align to your IT organization’s standards for recovery time objective (RTO) and business up-time expectations. Disaster recovery plans must reflect these measures and be tested to protect against potential downtime.

6. Scalability and Compliance

CCaaS solutions must scale with your business. Validate scalability by conducting load tests and documenting performance metrics. Compliance is equally important—ensure your migration adheres to industry standards like HIPAA, FedRAMP, or FINRA through thorough compliance testing and documentation.

Conclusion

A successful CCaaS migration hinges on meticulous planning, comprehensive testing, and strong change management. By following these best practices, you can minimize risks, ensure operational continuity, and set your organization up for long-term success with its new contact center platform. The result? An enhanced customer experience and a contact center infrastructure that grows with your business.

In today’s markets, generative AI is revolutionizing industries by streamlining content creation, enhancing customer engagement, and driving innovation. Businesses leverage this technology to gain a competitive edge, improve operational efficiency, and deliver personalized experiences. In customer service, generative AI enables chatbots and virtual agents to understand and respond to customer inquiries with high accuracy and relevance, enhancing service personalization, solving complex problems, and improving feedback analysis.

The emergence of generative AI (GenAI) has created novel revenue streams for systems integrators that provide services integrating GenAI capabilities into customer support platforms and workflows. To maintain a competitive edge, these service providers must proactively develop strategies to deliver GenAI-powered solutions to their clients.

The Competitive Landscape: GenAI System Integrators for Customer Support Services

Perficient is proud to be listed under Competitive Profiles in the Gartner Competitive Landscape: GenAI System Integrators for Customer Support Services report, published June 11, 2024. “This Competitive Landscape assesses eight different vendors playing a prominent GenAI SI role in customer service.” “Final selection captured a mix of SIs serving customers focused on different types of accounts. Gartner categorize these SIs as strategic SIs, global tech SIs and regional tech SIs. There is some overlap among these SIs, so it is common for SIs of different categories to compete against one another. All vendors selected leveraged a mix of hyperscaler GenAI vendors, usually complemented with one or more open-sourced vendors.”

Our GenAI and Customer Care Capabilities

According to Gartner, “GenAI opens new revenue opportunities for service providers offering system integration services that support customer support platforms and processes.”

As a global tech SI, we believe Perficient stands out for its approach to GenAI implementation in customer support. Some key points that we believe differentiate Perficient include:

1. Vertical Expertise: Perficient has notable strengths in manufacturing, healthcare, and retail sectors, which are leading the initial GenAI adoption for customer support. This aligns with Perficient’s well-established legacy SI business in these verticals.
2. Comprehensive CCaaS Support: Perficient supports multiple Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms, with a focus on leading providers like Amazon Connect, Cisco, Genesis, and Five9.
3. Flexible Technology Approach: While prioritizing GenAI platforms from major hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft), Perficient also integrates specialized tools from vendors like Mistral, Databricks, Pinecone, and Writer when needed. This approach ensures clients receive the most effective and tailored GenAI solutions.
4. Scaling and Repeatability: As highlighted in the Gartner report, Global SIs like Perficient can support hundreds or even thousands of customers with the ability to scale for large enterprises. This allows for speed and efficiency that can be reapplied across similar industries or use cases.
5. Responsible AI Governance: When harnessed properly, AI has the potential to impact all aspects of business operations and customer experiences. Moving ideas from conception to production presents new readiness challenges such as use case selection with business cases, encouraging awareness and appropriate use, and ethical and fiscal risk management. Perficient’s PACE Framework is a holistic approach to designing tailored operational AI programs that empower business and technical stakeholders to innovate with confidence while mitigating risks and upholding ethical standards.

Our Contact Center Capabilities

Perficient provides comprehensive services for contact centers and customer interaction solutions. We strategize the optimal approach for handling customer interactions and develop operational plans for contact centers and related functions. We identify the best technology fit for a client’s needs, designing and implementing leading platforms like Twilio Flex and Amazon Connect to create top-notch customer engagement solutions. Our experts integrate these contact center systems with complementary platforms to deliver full-fledged solutions.

Perficient’s managed services ensure continuous support, so customer interactions occur uninterrupted. This allows businesses to nimbly adapt and make changes in response to market shifts and evolving customer needs. With Perficient’s services, organizations can provide seamless, agile customer experiences powered by cutting-edge contact center technologies.​

Learn More About Perficient’s CX Services

Whether your business is just starting its Generative AI journey or seeking to enhance its current efforts, partnering with the right service provider can make all the difference.

Gartner subscribers can find the report directly at Competitive Landscape: GenAI Systems Integrators for Customer Support Services.

Gartner, Competitive Landscape: GenAI Systems Integrators for Customer Support Services, 11 June 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Where’s my order? What’s my tracking number? How do I order spare parts? When will the service technician arrive? These are all common questions lobbed into customer service centers. Your contact center is a living knowledge base where your agents not only cover common questions, but also provide expert-level answers to the complex questions your customers ask. The expertise your contact center agents developed answering these questions combined with your contact center teams’ ability to deliver empathetic and efficient customer experiences opens revenue generating opportunities for your business.

Here are 4 scenarios where your contact center provides opportunities to drive revenue.

Reinforce Efforts to Prevent Out-of-stock Situations

This 2023 study by the IHL Group indicates out-of-stock situations result in $1.2 Trillion in global lost sales for retailers. Whether your retail stores hold inventory to stock their shelves, or you’ve expanded their role to mini distribution centers with forward-deployed inventory to service your regional omni-channel customers, inventory shortages and out-of-stock situations occur unexpectedly. Every out-of-stock situation your agents prevent through proactive outreach to your store managers prevents lost sales and ensures customer satisfaction with their local store. Contact center agents and support staff often have direct access to corporate inventory, supply chain, and manufacturing line data via their ERP tools. If your contact center does not have outbound dialing or other outreach capabilities today, consider adding outbound capabilities as part of an overall plan to monitor store and distribution center inventory changes. Trigger fail safe tasks into new agent queues focused on inventory follow-up, so your agents reach out to store and distribution center managers and planners to verify stock on hand and arrange for replenishment.

Detect Customer Struggles and Offer Live Help

A recent survey of 1000 B2B buyers indicates 33% of those buyers experience online order errors. How does your company detect and resolve online B2B order issues to retain these customers?

Order validation algorithms using serverless technologies provide rapid, low cost detection solutions to identify unrecognized parts on customer orders, suggest similar replacement products using vector search queries and prompt your agents to offer the customer live in-line, in-context chat to ensure your buyer’s issue is resolved.

Whenever your customers dwell in an area of your website for a long period of time, when they fail to submit a web form correctly, when they abandon a chatbot conversation, or when they rapidly click between two to three pages within your site, your customer is struggling, and your agents can help. Modern Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions provide agent co-browse capabilities to let agents see the same view of your website or mobile app that your customer sees. Pair agent co-browse capability with mobile app and web site instrumentation to detect customer actions such as excessive page dwell time, rapid successive page bounces and multiple video skip forwards which indicate your customers are struggling to obtain the information they need or potentially make a purchase on one of your digital properties. Detect these struggle events using website and mobile app instrumentation then trigger your contact center into action. Agents engage the frustrated user using live chat and co-browsing to assess the situation, provide resolution and even offer an additional discount or upgrade to entice the customer to complete their purchase.

Monetize Your Knowledge Workers’ Combined Expertise

Consider the amount you’ve invested to build a skilled contact center workforce that provides rapid problem resolution, expert-level product guidance and concierge-level handling of logistics challenges. Now consider the subject matter experts (SME) such as application engineers and solution engineers within your company who often engage at a moment’s notice to diagnose and resolve customers’ technical challenges and their design issues. The combined expertise and experience of your senior contact center staff and your SMEs offer a unique premium service to your market. Many CCaaS platforms provide full API integration into software applications your employees already use so there’s no need for them to learn new tools to service clients who want your company’s consulting expertise. Instead, knowledge workers you designate receive in-app alerts to assist clients with architecture and design questions based on that knowledge worker’s expertise. To ensure you make the best use of your clients and your employees time, you can integrate your learning management system or employee skills database expertise rankings into your CCaaS routing algorithm ensuring new requests route to the best-skilled, available employee.

Provide Services to Your Dealers, Franchisees, and Stores

Your store managers, dealers, distributors and even franchisees all incur significant monthly overhead to support and operate their businesses. Services your contact center consistently delivers at scale may address some of their overhead needs and lower their overhead rate. For example, your agent forecasting and shift scheduling expertise and application knowledge helps dealers who must schedule salespeople, service technicians and warehouse staff. Instead of every dealer sourcing and learning a separate employee scheduling service they source and learn from your team. Your contact center staff’s expertise also offers the opportunity for consultative sales of add-on services such as extended warranties or pre-paid maintenance. Senior contact center agents facilitate delivery of these services. They know the intricacies of the plans, and they see how these plans benefit consumers when product issues arise. This enables your senior agents to easily build credibility and advise customers on their warranty or maintenance plan purchase. Using video contact center features, you can engage these senior agents with prospective buyers at your branches and dealerships to answer customer questions and address concerns that may be blocking a purchase.

Taking the next step

I hope the options presented in the blog post such as preventing out-of-stock situations at a local store, assisting struggling online customers to complete purchases and packaging your team’s knowledge into expert-level consulting services pique your interest and spark conversations about monetizing your contact center. Your contact center’s capabilities enable you to prevent lost revenue and drive new revenue for your business. Take the next step. Perform a capability analysis of your contact center then assess your company’s revenue challenges against those capabilities. You will likely identify several capabilities that directly address your revenue challenges. If you need help with that analysis or want to discuss alternatives, please reach out to me or contact Perficient.

In the final installment of our series on Cypress, we explore how to integrate this powerful testing tool into your development workflow. By incorporating Cypress into your continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) processes, you can automate testing, improve code quality, and accelerate deployment cycles. This article provides practical steps and best practices for making Cypress a seamless part of your development pipeline.

Integrating Cypress with CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are key practices in modern development that help teams deliver code changes more frequently and reliably. Here’s how to integrate Cypress into your CI/CD pipeline:

1. Choose a CI/CD Platform: Popular platforms include Jenkins, CircleCI, and GitHub Actions. The choice depends on your team’s preferences and the complexity of your projects.
2. Configure Cypress in CI/CD:

• • Install Cypress: Add commands to install Cypress in your CI/CD configuration file.
  • 
  • Run Cypress Tests: Add a step to execute Cypress tests

3. Handle Test Artifacts: Configure your CI/CD pipeline to store screenshots and videos of the test sessions. This is useful for debugging failures post-build.

Parallel Testing with Cypress

To further optimize your testing process, Cypress supports parallel testing. This feature allows you to split your test suite across multiple machines or containers, reducing the total execution time significantly.

• Configure Parallel Testing: Update your CI configuration to run tests in parallel.
• Use Cypress Dashboard: To manage parallel tests effectively, integrate with the Cypress Dashboard, which distributes the workload evenly and provides a centralized view of test results.

Best Practices for Cypress Parallel Testing

• It is always better to keep tests focused, isolated and concise.
• Try to group tests that take longer to execute separately.
• Re-execute tests that fail sequentially to debug the error in a better way.
• For flaky tests, add retries.
• When using repeatable data sets, use a data-driven approach.
• Try to eliminate test execution dependency by using random seeds.

Conclusion

Integrating Cypress into your development workflow enhances not only the efficiency but also the reliability of your development process. Automated testing with Cypress in a CI/CD pipeline ensures that each code change is tested before it reaches production, reducing bugs and improving software quality. This proactive approach to testing empowers development teams to maintain high standards and deliver better products faster.

By following the steps and practices outlined in this series, you can establish a robust testing framework that supports your development goals and workflow seamlessly. Remember, the goal of integrating Cypress is not just about finding bugs but ensuring that your development process is as efficient and reliable as possible.

Thinking that we are a company that is in constant growth with talent located around the world, we must seek strategies that allow us to expand all the knowledge we have globally to be able to meet the challenges of the market regardless of our location and thus provide the best customer experience, deliver the greatest possible value to our customers, and increase growth opportunities for the people who are part of Perficient. This is what we call Global Depth.

The Customer Experience

In today’s digital world, it is important to ensure that companies provide their customers with the best experience through communication channels that allow them to interact and solve their needs quickly and easily, guaranteeing automated processes that open the possibility to customize the attention according to the profile of each one, and in the same way that allows them to scale according to the need and growth of their business. 

Twilio

This is where Twilio becomes a very attractive alternative since its solution includes all of the above-mentioned features. Precisely because of these features, today, it is one of the leading tools in the cloud communications space that has been adopted globally, transforming customer experience from startups to large companies serving different types of industries.

Twilio, through its versatility and flexibility, guarantees the ability to adapt to all types of users, from those who prefer to make requests through WhatsApp messages or text messages to those who would opt for videos or emails to the more traditional user who prefers to use phone calls to get the service they need. It provides a seamless experience that responds to each user’s profile. 

This is how all these alternatives, which allow companies to individualize the process and pay attention to each of their customers, ultimately translate into people’s loyalty to those who provide them with a service or a product. It is at this point where you can see the value of adopting these technologies that impact business growth. 

Partnering with Perficient

At Perficient, we recognize the importance of being a strategic ally for each of our customers and the customer experience they offer, that is why we are constantly looking for different alternatives that allow us to achieve the goal of providing the best service experience to its users through tools that are flexible, scalable, that enable easy integration with other types of systems, that optimize decision making and above all that are in constant innovation. 

With Twilio’s capacity developed in the US, we have been able to reach leading clients in different industries; an example of this was in the construction industry, where we were able to implement a contact center solution that included chat and voice calls, allowing our client to assist their users with any inconvenience they might have. This implementation allowed us to automate manual processes in which it was not easy to track each case’s status and to have statistics on the type of problems reported, those that had been resolved, etc. In addition, they could guarantee the tracking of all the reports made and, with this, the attention to all the requests. 

Our Collaboration with Twilio

Continuing to pave the way and gaining knowledge in customer experience interests us as a company; that is why we started collaborative work with Twilio experts in the US, and we analyzed the industries and customers with whom we were working. We could implement the type of challenge that people were facing to define what those prerequisites in terms of background should have for those who started the training process, and given this, we concluded that we should start with people with experience in NodeJS technologies mainly, but also with knowledge in React, the mastery of JavaScript as a language was very important. 

In October 2021, we started the training with 2 people to be certified in Twilio Flex, which is the platform for contact center implementation offered by Twilio and is where we currently had the greatest opportunity to deploy people to apply the knowledge learned during the training. But as it usually happens on many occasions, it was not in the first attempt that we would achieve the goal. Despite the effort invested at that time, in the end, we did not achieve that people could put into practice what they learned during the certification process in an actual project, and the plan was left on standby for a while. After a few months of pause, we resumed the plan, we trained a couple more people who managed to obtain the fundamental certifications (Twilio Platform and Twilio Flex) and in this opportunity, we were able to confirm their participation in a project doing simple maintenance that allowed them to consolidate the acquired knowledge. 

Today, we have around 15 certified people from Latam, 13 of whom are working on a project applying the knowledge acquired by migrating from a legacy on-premises contact center to Twilio Flex, upgrading and evolving Twilio implementations in the Health industry. In this way, we are making sure that our customers have the best experience from any corner of the world where we operate in Perficient.

If you want to learn more about Perficient’s success with Twilio, read here.

Welcome to the first installment of our three-part series designed to deepen your understanding of Cypress, a cutting-edge tool for testing web applications. This series aims to guide web developers through the intricacies of Cypress, from getting started to integrating advanced testing techniques into your development workflow. Whether you’re new to automated testing or looking for an alternative to your current tools, this series will equip you with the knowledge to enhance your testing strategy effectively.

Introduction to Cypress

In the realm of web development, delivering flawless applications is crucial. Cypress stands out as a premier testing framework, specifically engineered for the modern web. It simplifies the testing process, offering a more intuitive and efficient approach to ensuring your web applications work exactly as intended. Unlike traditional testing frameworks, Cypress is built with the web in mind, making it a go-to choice for developers working with React and other JavaScript frameworks.

Why Choose Cypress? A Comparative Look

While there are several testing frameworks available, such as Vitest and Jest, Cypress distinguishes itself in several key areas:

• Real-Time Feedback: Cypress runs tests in a real browser, providing instant feedback on your app’s behavior in a real-world scenario. This contrasts with Jest, which primarily focuses on unit and snapshot testing without a browser environment.
• Easier Debugging: Cypress’s Test Runner offers a unique debugging experience, allowing you to see exactly what happened at each step of your test. Vitest, while fast and efficient for unit testing, doesn’t offer the same level of interactive debugging.
• Rich Ecosystem: Cypress not only supports end-to-end testing but also integrates various types of testing such as API testing and component testing, providing a comprehensive testing solution.
• No Configuration Hassle: Cypress requires minimal configuration to get started, making it accessible for beginners. Jest and Vitest, though configurable, can require additional setup for end-to-end testing capabilities.

Installation and Configuration

To integrate Cypress into your React project (or any JavaScript framework), follow these simple steps:

1. Install Cypress via npm:

npm install cypress –save-dev

2. Open Cypress for the first time:

npx cypress open

Choose E2E.

3. Quick configuration: Quick configuration: On the next step, the Launchpad will scaffold out a set of configuration files appropriate to your chosen testing type, and the changes will be listed for you to review.

4. Launching a browser: Select the bowser you want to work with.
5. Add a test file: We’re going to do this with the Create new empty spec button.

On clicking it, you should see a dialog where you can enter the name of your new spec. Just accept the default name for now.

The newly-generated spec is displayed in a confirmation dialog. Just go ahead and close it with the ✕ button.

Structure of a Test in Cypress

A Cypress test file follows a simple structure, making it easy to organize and read tests. Here’s a basic outline:

• Describe Block: Groups similar tests.
  • It Block: Defines an individual test.
    • Expect Statement: Asserts the outcome.

Your First Test with Cypress

Example of a basic test to verify a button’s functionality on a webpage:

describe(‘Button Click Test’, () => {

it(‘successfully clicks a button’, () => {

cy.visit(‘/’);

cy.get(‘.my-button’).click();

cy.get(‘.result’).should(‘contain’, ‘Button clicked!’);

});

});

Advantages of Using Cypress

Cypress offers several benefits over traditional testing frameworks, such as real-time reloading, direct browser access, simplified asynchronous testing, and rich debugging capabilities.

Cypress is transforming web application testing with its developer-friendly approach, making it an excellent choice for React projects and beyond.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our series, where we delve into advanced testing techniques with Cypress.