September 9, 2015
With technology advancing so rapidly, anyone who tries to guess what things will be like next year is basically just taking a shot in the dark—as the saying goes. So imagine trying to look five years down the road? One writer has done just that, and he’s come up with some interesting insights.
CustomerThink is a U.K.-based global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable, customer-centric enterprises. The site serves more than 80,000 visitors per month from 200 countries. In a recent opinion piece on CustomerThink.com, Andrew Lamrock, Director of Enterprise Intelligence at Call Journey, listed what he called his “Top 10 Predictions for the Contact Center in 2020.”
“Contact centers aren’t always the shining jewel in a company’s crown. However, as pressure mounts on brands to deliver excellent customer service, they are becoming a key focus in the battle for customer satisfaction,” Lamrock said. “Viewed as an increasingly important touchpoint, contact centers are sure to be a compelling focus for a [Customer Experience] overhaul.”
Here are some of Lamrock's predictions:
Forget the Voice/Chat/Email Divide: “The contact center of the future will present a unified front,” he says. “Whether the customer contacts a company by phone, email, chat, live chat, or social media, every agent will have a complete view of recent interactions and inquiries.”
An Army of Specialists: To remain relevant, companies will be forced to offer their customers a quick fix. In the years to come, front-line employees will become redundant. “After voicing their inquiry to the new generation of Natural Language Processing IVR, customers will be connected directly to a technical specialist who can help them on the spot, without the need for further transfers,” Lamrock says.
Conversation Analytics Will Be Everywhere: Lamrock believes that analyzing every bit of available information will become a guiding principle for future companies. “Data gathered by call centers will become an integral source of information for the company’s decision-makers.”
Uber-Style Employment Is Next: Lamrock believes that employees will be trained and tested online. They will be given Uber-style online profiles where their skills will be rated by both monitoring algorithms and clients.
Community and Loyalty Will Be Rewarded: The focus will shift from achieving desired metrics to helping customers, and to encourage engagement, most agents will be given more autonomy. “Offering opportunities to advance beyond the contact center hierarchy will be crucial to prevent valuable agents from leaving,” Lamrock notes.
In short, the contact center of the future will combine the best of what we have today with whatever the next five years bring. The bottom line will be a better experience for callers and a higher profile for contact centers in general. To read Lamrock’s full blog post, click HERE.