What if you got the powers to travel into the future?
What’d you do? Explore different realms of the world? Well, Marvel movie characters are doing enough of that!
A true visionary would actually wanna know who’s winning the NBA finals or who’s gonna be the next president of America….well, NO!
Knowing that contact centers have evolved rapidly in the past two years, thanks to the pandemic, they’d wanna explore it’s evolution well into 2022.
Why?
Of all the businesses impacted by the pandemic, call centers were faced with a unique challenge of increase in call volumes and employees operating from remote locations for extended periods of time.
“As per a 2020 study by Harvard Business Review, the difficult calls increased by almost 50% during the pandemic.”
Not equipped with advanced technology solutions, there was a 34% increase in hold times, during the initial phase of the pandemic.
You wouldn’t want to be on the losing side of the game. And, so it’s important to revamp your organization’s potential to match the evolving contact center capabilities.
There have been enormous efforts in upgrading the call center hardware and software technologies. Such up-gradations ought to influence customer experience as well as internal productivity.
What’s a contact center?
A contact center can be understood as a team of remote agents handling inbound and outbound calls for both new and existing customers. It allows for communication with a variety of channels including voice, such as text, social media, email etc.
Their purpose of a contact center is the handling of:
- sales queries
- offering customer support
- carrying out outbound sales
- track customer engagements
- capture interaction and performance data
Evolution over the years:
Traditionally, contact centers were limited to handling phone calls only. As far as technology and customer communication preferences are involved, this has changed a lot. Today there are umpteen ways to contact businesses and as a result, many contact centers can handle a broad range of customer interactions.
As of today, they have evolved into experience centers. There has been an evolution on many fronts:
- From limited communication channels to omnichannel
- From on-prem to the cloud
- An evolution from automatic call distribution to skills based routing
- From office agents to remote agents and,
- More proactive in responding to customer queries while also being efficient
The improvements are on-going and as technological advancement happens, it’s going to reflect in the contact centers too.
3 must have solutions for boosting contact center performance
The best of contact center software is not enough to polish the services they offer. The reason being the many changes happening in the field and until and unless, companies understand that trend, they’ll lose out on opportunities.
Here we list down 3 must-haves to help you realign your strategies to deliver the best experience to your customers.
1. Omnichannel integration:
Omnichannel is all about unifying your communications with customers to deliver standard services. It’s one way to centralize and optimize your customer interactions. It can help you deliver consistent customer experience across all your channels and communication devices.
Why has it become so important?
As per a report by Business2Community, 9 out of 10 users prefer an omnichannel service
This is because the touchpoints of communication have increased substantially, thanks to digitization. Don’t let that hamper productivity, rather let it define your company’s reputation in terms of efficiency and productivity. Omnichannel would be your best ally in this journey. It can help in:
- Delivering personalized customer experience
- Help users navigate across channels with ease
- ”Modern” customers can interact with brands anywhere, anytime and from any device.
2. Artificial intelligence:
AI will increase business productivity by over 35% before 2040 in the US alone : Accenture
AI in conversations has sparked a revolution in terms of enhancing business efficiency, which came in handy especially during the pandemic. It’s benefits comprise of:
- Reduction in manual call routing and shifting towards skills based routing
- Reduction in call wait times with intuitive call routing
- Supports the provision of multichannel support
- Streamlines contact center experiences
It can hasten the mining process of customer insights which can:
- Leverage predictive analysis to get valuable insights into customer journeys
- Determine resource requirements for your business
- Know how product roll-outs will perform at specific times
- Get to know the changes you need to make in order for conversations to be effective
When you are equipped to identify trends in customer data, strategizing best practices and predicting outcomes would become a course of action. And for that reason, investing in AI is worth it.
3. The cloud:
A Calibro study found that three-quarters of contact centers have moved to the cloud and 2022 would witness it’s use to the utmost potential by mainly contact centers.
It’s no secret that brands are installing cloud-based platforms which allow for remote agents to work customers in the same way as they were doing in conventional call centers. It’s become more important given the pandemic situation at hand which has forced contact centers to restructure their operations and work from home.
As per a recent survey, 65% of respondents wanted to work from home fully while 31% said they wanted a hybrid remote-work environment. That’s 96% of employees voting in favour of remote work. Work environments demand flexibility which cloud can easily resolve going ahead.
In trying times, cloud has been critical and can elevate customer experience under any condition.
It can help in :
- Reducing overall costs
- Render flexibility to contact centers and enable you to recruit global talent
- Improved security and compliance
- Increase uptime
The future of digital transformation:
In order to deliver a consistent and comprehensive customer experience, there is need for contact centers to break down silos and adopt a forward-thinking digital strategy. Technological innovations such as IoT and unified omnichannels are setting the tone for this.
Commitment to Social Network:
If you’re missing out on social media in today’s age and time you’re missing an opportunity in terms of potential customers.
53% of the world’s population uses social media.
Social networks have become an inextricable part of unified communication channels. Businesses can improve responsiveness and convenience of their services by keeping social networks central to their transformational strategy.
Promote two-way conversations and target modern customers by viewing social media platforms as viable channels to deliver customer service.
Analytics- The Driving Force:
Data has brought-in a paradigm shift across industries. It has become the key to improved customer services and enhanced performances.
- Predictive analytics can be useful in improving customer information across all touchpoints of communication.
- Sentiment analysis, rendered powerful by AI and ML can go a long way in understanding customer expression and ultimately judge their experience.
- Statistical dashboards are an up and coming technology to better the agent user interfaces
Way Forward:
Without a doubt, the future of contact centers would be more data-drive and predictive. Emerging technologies are going to impact the landscape and create further avenues for growth.
Now that we have peeked into the future, it’s time to buckle up for the evolving phase of contact center revolutions with the best tools and NovelVox has got you all covered for your ground-breaking journey!
