Contact Centre of the Future

What does a Contact Centre of the Future look like?

Let’s go back 15 years where the average consumer typically used one or two touchpoints when buying an item. Today’s consumers use an average of up to six touchpoints, with half of them regularly using more than four.

A contact centre of the future needs to adapt new technologies to meet their customer needs across all the different channels that they use in today’s world.

“It’s not just about how well you treat the customer any more, but how easy it is for the customer to interact with you.” – Chris Marron

 

Contact Centres Become a Relationship Hotspot

The contact centre is the primary link that connects customers to your business. Businesses have begun adopting upcoming technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to serve their customers better. Omnichannel engagement is much higher than it used to be and contact centres are evolving to give customers a satisfactory experience and meaningful outcome to their requests on any channel.

Contact centres of the future need to engage consumers across all channels, evolving from traditional call centres to the evolved multi-channel contact centres. Consumer’s want to be able to contact the business through any channel and/or platform of their choice.

Live chat is an up-and-coming communications channel that is seeing an upward trend with the consumers’ constant need to switch between apps/channels.

 

Contact Centres Become Fully Remote

Coronavirus and the evolution of the cloud has triggered remote working to get entrenched way earlier than it would have under normal circumstances. Cloud-based phone systems allow for the flexibility to work from anywhere at any time, which means that contact centres do not have to be office based any more.

Supervisors can be working from any location as they will have the ability to monitor agents with real-time stats accessible from an app on their smartphones. Cloud-based phone systems provide mobile-based apps for agents allowing them to take a call from wherever they are.

Callers will be predictively routed to the agent in their geographical area if there is any requirement for field services. For example, a caller requiring a hardware replacement will be predictively directed by geographical based routing and Artificial Intelligence to the agent working in that area, which will significantly improve and speed up the resolution process.

Voice bot technology is fast maturing and fully capable in responding to common queries. Intelligent routing using speech IVR will assist in routing a caller efficiently and to the appropriately skilled agent.

Real-time analytics will enable supervisors to view agent and caller discussions in real time and by monitoring the progress and direction of the call, a supervisors intervention if a situation seems to escalate, is a mere click away.

 

Quality Over Quantity is the New Customer Service Mantra

Personalisation has become a crucial part of customer service. With the arrival of multiple technology devices, millennials are hopping between devices and channels when interacting with a business. It is not just about keeping up with the channel or device switching, companies also have to evolve to keep up with the technology as well.

The success of a contact centre is determined by how well the business can adapt to these new technologies.

Transactional metrics such as the average handling time and the number of calls handled will no longer be the benchmark for measuring agent productivity and performance.

 

What Significant Changes Can We Expect?

The next ten years in the contact centre space could see a major change happening in the way businesses operate and interact with their customers. We can expect to see an increasing number of communications moving from human to chat and bots.

Technology is rapidly evolving, and there are multiple opportunities in which contact centres will adapt and change to keep up with this growth.

AI will revolutionize the way customer interactions happen and we can already see multiple bot adoptions on the rise.

If you would like to digitally transform your contact centre, we have solutions to fit your specific business needs and help you achieve your goal.

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