The business-critical role assumed by Contact Centers has been driven by mounting customer expectations and requires more personalized touchpoints and faster issue resolution.

Consumers and the technologies they use are increasingly intelligent and require smarter solutions as we enter the next chapter of the unified Contact Center.

In the past couple of years, businesses have adopted modules from legacy vendors that promised features like AI, automations, self service, and native analytics within their existing solutions. They thought they were purchasing the future, only to realize three things:

1. Simplicity and flexibility are key with customer experience technology. Plugging in a module doesn’t necessarily equate to a personalized customer experience.
2. Contextual agent experience is more important than ever to build customer loyalty.
3. Voice as a channel contains incremental costs across every CCaaS provider; it adds up quickly, and it doesn’t have to.

While the Contact Center space is approaching maturity, it won’t truly arrive until we accept as an industry certain methodologies and tech prerequisites for the platforms that power the customer service experience.

• Contact Center software must serve as the primary hub of a modern CX tech stack.
• Contact Center software needs to provide an intuitive experience for agents and an invisible experience for customers.
• A single platform that can adapt and be customized is essential. Non-customizable tools with certain non-native features are a non-starter.

Verticalization of the Contact Center

Mid-year 2021, communications API industry veteran Plivo launched a powerful yet simple Contact Center platform—with fully native communication channels and analytics—to address the maturity gaps in an established and fast-evolving space. Plivo’s engineering team built a unified platform to manage the entire CX workflow, optimized the add-on costs of voice communications, and integrated it with the other complementary CX tools in your existing tech stack, all powered by Plivo’s communications API platform.

The result is Contacto, a fully native platform that integrates with tools like Salesforce, Shopify, Zendesk, Kustomer, Servicenow, and more. Contacto was architected to drive customer loyalty and reduce complexity, while ensuring that agents have a simple and seamless experience with their workflows. With common pain points in the customer experience as its focal point, Contacto was built to level up CCaaS technology using real-world CX gaps as the North Star. These include:

• Customer experience, on their terms: Meet your customers on the channels and devices they demand.
• Unified agent desktop experience: One platform manages all interactions with continual context available so your customers don’t have to repeat themselves—ever.
• Simple configuration and drag-and-drop workflow builder: Build powerful no-code workflows that keep your agents moving forward and your customers happy.

Contacto, Powered by Plivo

The Contacto Contact Center experience is the next chapter in Plivo’s rich history. Contacto is built on Plivo’s Premium Communications Platform, which has been proven for scale over the last 10 years with billions of API requests each month. It natively supports voice and emerging channels like in-app chat, WhatsApp, and social media and has prebuilt integrations with existing applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, Kustomer, and more.

We are glad to be here, and we can’t wait to bring the Contact Center space to maturity with the help of our amazing customers and our strong foundation in scaling the Plivo API platform globally in 190+ countries.