The Future of Contact Centres Related Articles Trends Transforming Cloud Contact Centres The Future of Contact Centres: Trends and Predictions Virtual Call Centres and the Future of Call Centre Work Why the Future of Contact Centres Is Cloud-Based © thenatchdl-Adobe Stock-314369183 378 Filed under - Guest Blogs, Talkdesk Marco Costa of Talkdesk shares three predictions regarding the future of the contact centre industry. The cloud ensures a remarkable pace of innovation, which is what ultimately makes the difference in the customer’s journey. Our expectations as customers have been growing and are now higher than ever. From year to year, we expect that the services at our disposal, both digital and traditional, will surpass and go further. Customers change their opinion about a brand based on a bad customer experience, which shows that all interactions count. The 21st-century customer is extremely demanding and seeks real-time, personalized, effective and immediate customer service to solve their problems. Furthermore, this high-level customer service must be available on the channel that is most convenient for the customer. In a globalized market, there are plenty of options to choose from and competition is just a click away, so ensuring an excellent customer experience in all interactions is undoubtedly the real competitive advantage for companies today. More and more people are talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and there is widespread curiosity about this new technological wave. However, many companies have not yet addressed the most basic weaknesses in their contact centres. Much of the technology remains on-premises, holding finite capacity and hardware upgrades that take months to stand up. Thus, the adoption of innovations is limited, and engineers and researchers compete in a demotivating internal struggle for access to storage. In addition, sometimes integrations with CRM tools and customer databases are too rigid or non-existent to provide agents with context. Agents need context to personalize interactions as much as possible. Not having context makes coherence difficult within the same channel — regardless of the agent with whom you interact — and also between different channels. To flip the page and follow the paradigm shift, companies must be aware of the trends that are marking the sector’s panorama: 1. Migration to the Cloud The era of on-premises systems, installed on companies’ physical servers, is behind us. Updates available only every three, six or twelve months are simply not compatible with the current speed of transformation in the markets, which requires companies to adapt and innovate much faster to remain competitive. The scalability and flexibility of a cloud contact centre presents itself as the best solution, allowing companies to better align investment according to their growth. With new features available on the spot and enabling a multiplicity of integrations between services, the cloud ensures a remarkable pace of innovation, which is what ultimately makes the difference in the customer’s journey. 2. Natural Language Processing (NLP) The development of software capable of understanding and mimicking human language is another front in progress, with the objective of decoding interactions by voice and guiding agents. To do this, NLP automatically transcribes the conversations, analyses the content and takes a general impression of the customer. All of these contextual insights are made available to the agent in real time, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of each customer interaction. 3. Virtual Agents Virtual agents are particularly useful in automating the most repetitive interactions that human agents encounter on a daily basis, freeing them to focus on other tasks with greater added value. Chatbots are the most common and are progressing rapidly towards holding a conversation at a near-human level. The transformation of contact centres is an ongoing process driven by the evolution of customer expectations and technological innovations. Over the past decade, technological advancements have transformed the call centre into the contact centre and introduced a spectrum of channels through which customers can seek support. The next step now is to know how to integrate all these channels holistically and use them harmoniously to offer the best experience ever. This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Talkdesk – View the Original Article For more information about Talkdesk - visit the Talkdesk Website About Talkdesk Talkdesk is a global customer experience leader for customer-obsessed companies. Our contact center solution provides a better way for businesses and customers to engage with one another. Find out more about Talkdesk Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper. Author: Talkdesk Published On: 29th Apr 2020 Read more about - Guest Blogs, Talkdesk Recommended Articles Trends Transforming Cloud Contact Centres The Future of Contact Centres: Trends and Predictions Virtual Call Centres and the Future of Call Centre Work Why the Future of Contact Centres Is Cloud-Based Related Reports Guide: Creating a Culture of Compassion in Retail Contact Centers Report: UK Contact Center Verticals - Finance eBook: Generative AI and the Contact Center of the Future Report: Global Contact Center KPI Benchmarking Contact Centre Reports, Surveys and White Papers Get the latest call centre and BPO reports, specialist whitepapers and interesting case-studies. Choose the content that you want to receive. Contact Centre Reports, Surveys and White Papers Invites to Webinars & Events Weekly Newsletter