The folks at West Interactive (News - Alert) know how important contact center transformation is. But as they thought about this concept, they began to realize that the term itself was a bit limiting. Transforming the contact center is not enough. In this day and age of constantly changing customer interactions, it is important to focus more broadly on customer contact transformation. It may seem, at first, to be a matter of changing a few words, but, as Dan Gordon, VP of Offer Management at West points out, it makes all the difference in the world, like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

 Initially, the team at West noticed quite a few changes in the way enterprises were dealing with customers. New devices were changing the lives of ordinary people, and affecting the way they interacted with the contact center, and West was looking to bridge the gap between people and contact centers.

But, according to Gordon, what West began to realize is that this transformation was about more than just the contact center. It was about a world that was becoming more mobile and global and searchable. The challenge, then, was to transform business processes to enable choice and flexibility and to reduce frustration for customers as they interact with businesses. These devices make it easy for customers to start in one channel and finish in another, so how can companies mirror the way customers want to communicate? The answer, of course, is that these channels must be connected and data and interactions must be consistent. Gordon says that the key is connecting channels and making predictions about how and why customers are contacting businesses. It comes down to transforming the way customers connect rather than making structural changes.

Gordon points out that customers are in control of communications, not enterprises. It is important for West clients to realize that customers aren’t “owned” by any one organization in the enterprise. In other words, marketing does not own one channel, and data cannot be siloed. The question then becomes about how companies build technology internally or externally to support these changes.

West Interactive brings a great deal of value to this discussion. The company can provide technological solutions like IVR, social and mobile applications, but its real value is in helping clients connect all of these and more together to create a continuum of customer experience as they move from channel to channel. This is more meaningful to the end customer and makes them more loyal – and therefore more profitable.

In the end, we are in the midst of a great transformation in the way customers interact with enterprises. It goes far beyond the contact center and drills down to fundamental relationships with customers. And these are the relationships that need to be transformed in order to bring customer interactions into the present and the future.