Enterprises looking for new ways to improve the customer experience benefit from combining software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and contact centers. SD-WAN’s ability to simplify an increasingly complex network architecture and drive down costs also provides an opportunity to improve the customer experience with enhanced performance and expanded feature capabilities.

Digital Drives Omnichannel

As enterprises invest in more cloud technology, the push for digital transformation is expanding the formats in which customers make contact and the pathways those formats utilize. For instance, calls to a contact center traditionally connected through multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) using a hub-and-spoke network design. With cloud solutions offering a wide array of communications formats – including messaging, live chats, video conferencing, email, and social media – the traditional WAN architecture is not adequate.

Many of these applications and the accompanying data storage are housed in a cloud environment. This dramatically impacts network traffic as well as bandwidth demand. 

Increasing Complexity: As contact centers become more complex, some things remain the same, with areas like reliability, cost management, and predictability a priority for management. This places increased pressure on network teams to deliver reliable performance with a premium placed on customer experiences.

The expectations around the contact center have changed, with enterprises pushing to keep the customer experience competitive. In addition, agents are trained to do more than customer care, adding in roles related to increased profit margins or other revenue producing activities.

Enterprises are also racing to develop personalized experiences for customers that reflect their particular preferences and previous browsing and buying behaviors. Agents are trained to anticipate and respond to customer needs in order to improve satisfaction and loyalty, while customers have come to expect service at any time, in the format they prefer.

SD-WAN Equips Contact Centers

SD-WAN applies a virtual overlay to the physical network, introducing a centralized management console that improves the control and visibility of the network. It also offers a variety of connectivity pathways, allowing enterprises to augment MPLS lines with a variety of other options, including broadband internet.

SD-WAN also offers segmentation and optimization of traffic according to business policy, so a network team can prioritize traffic that requires real-time connectivity, such as a video conferencing session, over a data transmission, like email, that is less critical.

SD-WAN also allows contact centers to meet the bandwidth and performance demands associated with cloud-based contact center solutions. Agents won’t have challenges like dropped packets, latency, and congestion that can impact customer experiences.

Contact centers also receive the cost-reducing benefits of SD-WAN, with the ability to funnel critical traffic to more reliable, but more expensive, MPLS lines, while less-critical traffic can be directed to cheaper alternatives.SD-WAN offers contact centers the performance and management options they need to consistently offer personalized customer experiences without any interruptions in connectivity. Contact us at Access Tech for more information.