Go digital or go nowhere: the changing contact centre

The demand for the 4Cs in the contact centre that I discussed in my previous post is driven by the need to meet a greater, industry-wide challenge – the rise of the digital business. Your contact centre needs to challenge the status quo and be ready for the next disruptive technology, whether that’s big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) or Artificial Intelligence. How? By going through a digital makeover.

This digital transformation lets you move from simply delivering a customer experience to delighting the customer. Ultimately, your success depends on it. Many of your competitors are already doing it: half of all enterprises are expected to introduce advanced digital transformation initiatives by 2020. They are responding to the consumers who are going digital. More than 60 per cent of customers interact through multiple channels, blending the world of digital channels, such as mobile, social and kiosks, with traditional routes.

The next-generation contact centre will not just be a gateway to the organisation. In the future, 72 per cent of contact centres are looking to leverage advanced intelligence from reporting and analytics to improve customer satisfaction and operational productivity. It’s a big leap forward for many companies, putting a new focus on both current and future systems.

Mobile first

Approximately half of all inbound calls now come from mobile devices. Social media is now the preferred channel for one-in-three users, with almost all of those interactions taking place on the mobile. For the first time, several channels sit together on the same device – the mobile. How then can you make sure that you provide the same, great customer experience across any mobile device or channel? As with the growing demand for self-service support it requires greater integration between back- and front-end systems.

People first, Artificial Intelligence second

There are increasing moves towards automated interactions and sometimes virtual contact centre agents. Where does that leave the human touch? The idea is that technology can make us more efficient, taking over more mundane tasks so that we humans can deal with more complex, creative or specialist work. For example, one leading bank is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to review trading activities for risk assessment.

In the contact centre, AI can add value, reviewing conversation transcripts to see what excites and annoys callers in order to improve customer service. The aim is not to put the human in the machine, but to make the machine help the human.

Personalisation first

Beyond AI, challenger companies are also looking at new ways to interact with customers for greater engagement – combining IoT information with new ways of communicating from video to collaboration technologies and real-time speech-to-speech language translation. The rewards are great, but how can you be sure that you have invested in the best way to interact with your consumers, especially when each customer has their own preferred ways of communicating?

The key is personalisation, understanding the level of service and type of interaction each customer needs. This requires one omni-channel solution, a solution that integrates many digital technologies and traditional techniques to provide a truly personalised experience, anywhere and everywhere. And if that solution comes from one provider, even better: one capable of delivering and supporting a global platform in the cloud.

In my next blog I’ll look at how you can be a digital disruptor and lead the digital transformation in the contact centre.

To find out how to deliver and benefit from your global contact centre in the cloud, with a unique end-to-end guaranteed SLA, visit the InstaCC Global page here.