The latest technology trends and customer demands are reshaping customer support for today’s contact center. The increased demand for better experiences, faster response times, and a more personalized approach to customer service are causing contact centers to look at new approaches to streamlining processes, improving customer interactions, and resolving support issues better than they have in previous years.
Here are a few things we expect to see in 2018:
Consumers now have more ways than ever to communicate with contact centers. While some people may still prefer speaking with a real person over the phone, many are turning to email, webchat, social media, and even text messaging to interact with customer support teams. This multi-channel approach is forcing call centers to rethink not only the technology behind their call center but also the processes they use to handle customer inquiries. While it’s clear that many have adopted a multi-channel approach, many contact centers are looking ahead to omni-channel enablement, syncing all applications to seamlessly identify, route, and switch interactions between agents and channels.
The ability to anticipate a customer’s need and make predictions on how to best support their inquiries is all thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). Leveraging AI in contact centers isn’t an attempt to entirely replace humans with chatbots, but instead, an opportunity for contact centers to anticipate the needs of customers and use virtual assistants to provide instant help. Some are taking it even further with automation to position human agents to focus on more high-touch support issues, leaving the chatbots to handle basic customer requests. As this technology evolves, we anticipate that contact centers will continue to find more ways to integrate AI into processes and technology that will improve the customer experience and response times.
We’ve seen contact centers bring video communication into the fold in recent years. With video communications becoming a preferred method of communication among consumers, contact centers will likely continue to integrate video into their support offerings. In addition to providing a more personal approach to support, video also offers real-time interaction and gives agents more information than they can get over the phone. Customers and agents can visually display issues and solutions, resulting in faster resolution times.
Continued advancements in communication methods and technologies will have a tremendous impact on contact centers over the next few years. We are excited to see how legacy systems will use the latest technologies to refashion the way contact centers approach customer service.
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