Next Gen Contact Centers: Tech. Enabled, Context Driven, Customer Focused

The traditional idea of a contact center – a large room; cubicles arranged in orderly fashion; agents sitting before a computer with head phones; numerous voices echoing in the corridor; supervisors running around; wall boards and displays painting numbers; customers still waiting in queues; satisfaction still in question.

How does the next generation call center look like? First of all, there will not be a “center”.  Everything would be virtual. Channels are Omni. Agents and supervisors will be remote and mobile. Customer’s phones will store and use context. Analytics is personalized. The cloud will orchestrate contact, communications, context and conclusion. How will this happen?

The Customer’s Phone

We are already seeing that phone has now become the primary personal and professional tool of interaction. This use is only going to become exponential with an array of technologies and apps being piled on to that small device. Contact Centers can use this in a lot of ways. When a user becomes a customer (say he buys a PC from you), an app can be installed on his phone that would capture the entire customer context (Customer ID, products etc.). This app an then be used in a number of ways

·       Push notifications of order, upcoming bills, payment notifications and repair status

·       Training material and videos can be pushed through the app.

·       If the customer needs to call the contact center, he needs to just select the app. The app could then do a local “IVR” to collect reason for calling and call the appropriate number. It can also pass on context so the customer doesn’t have to spell out his name (and I always had trouble getting people to spell mine correctly) or other details and can get straight to the issue.

·       The phone’s video can be a huge asset. The customer can use the phone to “show” the problem with the product and the agent can troubleshoot it remotely. Saves a lot of time and money than shipping the product for repair.

·       Surveys can be conducted through the app, by choosing a time when the customer is actually using the phone (when they are most likely to answer the survey).

Mobile Agents

Today’s technologies allow agents to be remote, tomorrow’s will let them to be multi-tasking or mobile. A Store salesman or technical guru, can become an agent whenever he is not engaged with a store customer. An onsite repair technician can act as a technical consultant when he is driving from one location to another. A developer can help out on software technical support from his desk. The Agent’s phone can track the agent’s location and availability status and make them available when required. Supervisors can use personalized mobile analytics to track agent activity. Unified Communications can provide the platform to create a virtual bigger agent pool that can help faster resolution of problems.

Predictive Analytics

In today’s business, switching to a competitor is only a click away. Predicting what the customer needs and providing them with those solutions even before they even ask will go a long way in building a loyal customer base. Data is everywhere, but those who use them in the right way will win more customers. Contact Centers generate a lot of data from various end points and applications. Systems like ACD, emails, chat, IVR, Speech Analytics, Text Analytics, CRM, Social media etc. spit out so much data. Such data can be integrated into a single Customer 360 record which can then be used to track, analyze and predict customer behavior. Such analytics should help customers, supervisors, agents and executives to improve customer satisfaction.

Customer Tribes

In software today, when developers have technical questions, they don’t go to books or online manuals. They instead reach out to developer sourced websites like stackoverflow where developers help each other with solutions. This is a phenomenon that is going to extend to all products and services. Every product / service has a customer tribe – a virtual online group whose members interact with each other exchanging opinions, problems and solutions. Social media, review websites, online forums etc. provide these platforms. These customer tribes will form anyway even if a company does not want it. Rather, companies would be smart to instead host those customer tribes by providing platforms for mutual help between the customers. Customers get faster solutions and companies would save on customer survey and service costs. This would actually become one more channel of communication and Omni channel contact centers would extend their platform to add such capabilities.

Customers are changing in the way they communicate. Contact centers should adapt to these new paradigms if they want to keep their customers happy.