Change is hard, and constant. Especially if you work in the Customer Contact arena. It’s not just your processes that are regularly being updated, but who is completing them, on what shifts, using which Customer contact channel and what technology is being used to serve both agent and customer. It’s no wonder then, that the “Future” of the Contact Centre environment is a moving target.

Change is easier when you know how, but with many of the points discussed in this article, very few organisations have braved all of the potential permutations, and so the opportunity to blaze your own trail is still very much a possibility.

The very purpose of the Contact Centre is to provide help, but of course it’s not the only route a customer can take to get some assistance. Indeed the route a customer takes, is usually pre-determined by the type of customer they are. Are you a Do It Yourself (DIY) or a Do It For Me (DIFM) type of person yourself?

Of course, the type of customer you are trying to serve is just the tip of the iceberg. Which channel, who the agent works for (is the agent even a person, or an AI), where is the help coming from, office or at home, the list goes on, and continues to grow.

A very basic flow showing just one of the many paths is below;

There are 4 main levers to consider; broken down into 4 sections, I’ll quickly talk about 3 of them, and finish on the role of Technology. The 4 levers to consider are Customer, Agent, Technology & Channels.

Customer – As discussed earlier, the customer is evolving. Expectations are changing, and this is before COVID drove even the traditional consumer into more digital experiences. External factors vs those you control yourself, mean the customer is always the wild card when planning out the future. Of course, treat them badly, and you won’t have a “business” so plan, pivot and evolve your “Need Help” function to provide the support your customers demand,

Agent – The customer service agent, is often one of the least well-paid individuals in the Enterprise, but at the forefront of Customer Engagement. The role of the agent is becoming more complex for a number of reasons, one of which is the removal of the transactional queries from engagements due to increased levels of Self Serve capability and Automation. This leaves almost every query to be one of an exception, I.e. a task the automation has not worked on for various reasons, and so problem solving on the fly, using the tools and capabilities available to the agent becomes such an important attribute, all while remaining focused on a positive outcome for the customer. An agents role has never been harder.

A new set of roles will become the norm also, evolving from todays agent due to all of the other changes. Meet the Exception handler, the Multi-discipline expert and the Deep Domain experts that will supplement your contact centre in the future.

Channels – It used to be that the customer could contact you via Phone & Email, but this has long shifted to become a multitude of supplementary avenues, ranging from the traditional Voice call, to the Crowdsourced answer via Limitless, or a vibrant community of customers, nurtured by Standing on Giants. Many of the channels available can be answered using people, or Technology such as Voice & Chat Bots, or NLP for Email & Tickets that are raised (More on technology later) – The biggest shift in channels in more recent times is the rise of the Asynchronous messaging functions, historically focused on platforms like SMS & Messenger, but now branching out into Instagram, and WhatsApp. I would liken these particular channels to the email of today for the digitally enabled at least. And I haven’t even mentioned the growing popularity of Home Voice assistants. “Alexa, what was the 4th area of focus in this section of my article?”

“You need to discuss the role that technology plays in underpinning everything discussed previously, and a whole lot more, Wayne”

Technology – New tech, needs to be the saviour here, without a significant technology enablement here, it will become very easy to become an also ran. If we thought change was quick before COVID, it’s widely appreciated that most business have gone through around 4 years of change in not much over 4 months. This rapid change has proven to most that the enterprise of old, can indeed shift course, in some instances create new business models over night and has learned to survive in uncertain times, but much of this shift has been enabled through the right technology, and this understanding and appreciation will be critical over the next the next 36 months.  

New technology solutions that enable the repetitive queries, and agent actions to be automated, reduced, or removed will become increasingly important, as will the ability to find answers/solve problems quickly and often without the support of colleagues. The use of Humley’s knowledge base search function to assist in finding answers quickly, or Re:infer to not only help automate, but provide insight and analytics into your email, ticket and message based comms, to assist with efficiency but also provide the direction for removing contacts all together through conversation mining.

We mentioned above that the agents role is becoming more difficult, and so agent assistant technologies, those that either do something for, or provide further proactive help are and will become even more important in the future, especially if the agent is working from home, or part of a gig workforce. Hold time is often used as a mechanism to either get help or complete a task (check out NEVA here from NICE), imagine if both were completed for the agent, by technology? What would that do to reduce your overall handling time and of course increase customer satisfaction?

Using speech recognition technology to prove compliance (listening out for key phrases being confirmed by the agent in a conversation via Recordsure), providing more insights into customer demand and problems, or through the use of Conversational AI in your IVR’s, providing a 24/7 route via the traditional voice channel, to serve your customers.

In summary, Contact Centres are always under a huge amount of pressure to deliver, they are the front door into many organisations, and change is constant. Don’t get lost in understanding what you could do, speak with ISG Automation to understand what you should do.