There are exciting changes ahead in the contact center industry as businesses innovate their contact centers to remain competitive. As a key differentiator, the customer experience will hold industry focus in 2018, however, it has propagated an upsurge of interest in closely-related topics like the agent experience. Artificial intelligence, social media, and new data sources continue to create their own unique roles in the contact center. (Or is it the engagement center?)
Here are 6 contact center trends to watch in 2018.
Integration in the name of innovation
To remain competitive, businesses must offer an exceptional customer experience. Not only that, but consumers also want consistent experiences as they move across channels. However, this level of service is beyond the capabilities of the traditional contact center, where systems and technologies typically exist in isolation and don’t speak with one another. These communication gaps are where inconsistency and poor service rear their ugly heads. Customer interactions and business processes don’t exist in a vacuum, so why does the resultant data?
The demand of seamlessness between channels is the premise behind the engagement center. According to Gartner, the Customer Engagement Center (CEC) is a logical set of technologies and business applications that are engineered to provide customer service and support, regardless of the interaction (or engagement) channel. Generally, businesses recognize the benefits of cross-channel capabilities, but struggle to get started i.e., successfully join the data. According to Deloitte, companies report that the biggest obstacle to realizing intended ROI is integration with existing systems. The sheer number of technology integrations combined with inflexible legacy systems can make the engagement center seem like a pipe dream.
So how to overcome this? Some are kicking the can down the road, but many of the more complex i.e., multi-system — contact centers are reaching out to data integration solutions for help. The demand for solutions that simplify large-scale integrations and platform transitions will grow now that the concept of engagement center has gained widespread acceptance. There is also a need for more logistical content that addresses how the engagement center can be realized, not why it should be.
Agent Empowerment
Customer service does not begin and end with the customer. In fact, much of customer service depends on agent empowerment. Are agents trained and granted the latitude they need to do better work? For customers, nothing is more frustrating than explaining an issue to a series of agents that can’t help you because of red tape or lack of knowledge.
Many companies recognize the power of agent empowerment and are drastically changing the agent experience to accommodate. Deloitte’s 2017 Global Contact Center Survey says that all respondents… will be investing in talent improvement programs in the next two years. Seventy-three percent plan to use analytics to better assign staff and sixty-three percent will expand their training programs.
Empowerment can also come in the form of better tools and facilities. The agent workforce is increasingly made of millennials who think and work differently from the generations that came before them. Millennial-ready, on-the-job tools like screen pops, customizable graphical interfaces, gamification, and agent scripting will grow in popularity as more businesses realize that well-equipped contact center agents can be some of the best brand advocates. A fitting example of this is 8x8s quality management application that uses Twitter-like @mentions to send agents helpful training examples in real-time.
To attract this younger workforce, businesses are working hard to accommodate a better work-life balance. More contact centers are planning to accommodate flexible work arrangements, like working from home or part-time positions. Some contact centers are supplementing campuses with amenities likely to be found on Amazon or Google campuses.
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Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The uses of AI in the contact center are many. It has become increasingly clear that AI will become a staple in the business landscapes of the future. Research by Gartner states that by 2020, AI will be a top five investment priority for more than thirty percent of CIOs. Thirty-three percent of executives surveyed by Deloitte indicated that AI and robotic process automation (RPA) have matured enough to justify strategic investment by 2019.
As more businesses find creative ways to implement AI and bots, the focus is shifting from how AI can be used to how it can be used wisely. AI should never be used to depersonalize the customer experience, rather, it should serve as an enhancement to customer service processes. For example, chatbots cant replace agents, but they allow agents to be the best version of themselves by taking over the more menial tasks and getting agents the information they need, faster. The Will a Robot Take My Job? search engine by McKensie&Company; estimates that 29% of customer service tasks can be performed by a robot. For example, robots cant effectively upsell product and services, or train employees; however, they can collect deposits and fees, and inspect items for damage and defects.
The engine behind Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, is an example of AI technology that’s been introduced in the contact center. Alexa, in combination with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU), can understand questions, respond intelligently, and can decide which agent should receive a call. It is speculated that Alexa may eventually be able to engage in real-time coaching. Alexa is a document-retrieval tool at its core, but it is also able to learn. As it listens to agent-customer interactions, it may in time be able to recommend the next best course of action via the retrieval of helpful articles.
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Voice assistants as data sources
Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri can deliver more of what customer service needs to deliver an exceptional experience: customer insight. Agents can speak more intelligently about a customer’s situation if the customer’s history and account information are available. To which products does this customer subscribe? From which phone number did the customer make his last contact? When? Why? With whom did he speak? Without this information, all interactions must start back at square one. Interactions would be much easier for customers (and agents) if all this information was readily available.
Voice assistants are entrenched so deeply in the lives of their users, and they are granted access to everything schedules, user preferences, products and services purchased, subscriptions, information on dozens of accounts. Imagine the insights they could offer contact centers if used as a data source. The information could be used to deliver a truly personalized customer experience. The context behind customer interactions could be predicted from the onset, and needs could be anticipated for the customer. Since voice assistants are designed based on a machine learning platform, they would become smarter and more accurate with their insights.
Imparting preferences and frequent actions to these voice assistants requires a large commitment of the user’s time and personal information, and its all in the name of convenience.
Once customers are used to this level of expediency and service (literally) at their beck and call, it will become the new standard to which all brands will be held. Customers may grant access to their voice assistant data to accomplish this level of convenience.
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Social media is being treated as more than an optional channel…
A true omni-channel experience must deliver the same level of service across all channels. This includes social media, the channel of choice for many young consumers who are accumulating buying power, and have heavy influence over others through recommendations. Social media will be even more critical for companies to master, and there will be more hype surrounding it as it becomes a key differentiator. According to Deloitte, Social media will likely emerge as a mainstream medium for customer service. It is expected to expand from just 4% of contact center interactions today to 9% in 2019.
Consider conversational interfaces e.g., chatbots. Advancements in voice processing and AI learning mean that conversational interfaces will be able to manage many routine customer service tasks. For example, a travel company may use Facebook’s Messenger chatbot, M, to send a link to change a flight itinerary if it picks up on keywords in the chat window that the users flight has been canceled. If chatbots can pull up these functions on command, they could eliminate extensive service menus.
As of late, there are more advanced training classes for seasoned or expert agents that should assume a social support role. Speedy, yet empathetic customer service on social media requires an advanced skillset, so classes may teach agents how to determine customer’s emotional states through a tweet and how to respond accordingly. (Is a smiley face emoji appropriate in this situation or should I issue a more formal apology?)
The length and public nature of social media are also things agents are trained to consider. Some issues are best handled in the channel through which the customer reached out, while others are better handled offline. There are no one-size-fits-all rules for social media service, which is one reason why hiring deeper talent and cross-training the best agents available will become a higher priority for many contact centers.
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Transactional v. Experiential
Customer interactions can generally be divided into two categories: transactional and experiential. Transactional requests are often routine and should be relatively effortless for the customer. They can typically be accomplished through self-service options e.g., checking an account balance or paying a bill. Experiential requests require more hand-holding on the part of the company e.g., helping a customer understand billing changes or a new company policy.
Many contact centers already focus on transactional metrics e.g., calls in queue and time per interaction that measure the efficiency of the interaction. However, efficiency isn’t the whole picture. The effect of the transaction on the customer’s experience i.e., experiential metrics like customer satisfaction and repeat contacts is also extremely important. The real innovators are the companies that understand this and are working to accommodate both types of metrics in their reports and dashboards.
Once transactions are categorized, contact centers must determine how to measure and score themselves accordingly. There are contact centers that say they recognize the importance of the customer experience; however, they still incentivize their agents based on transactional metrics like Average Handle Time. There will be a shift in how some companies monitor performance using dashboards that display experiential as well as transactional metrics.
The customer experience will continue to be at the focus of the industry in 2018, however, the conversation continues to propagate new realms of discussion: voice assistants, artificial intelligence, the agent experience. There is already ample content supporting why these endeavors are worthwhile, so content should shift to how they can be wisely implemented in the contact center.
