Predicting the Future of the Contact Centre: The Conscious Contact Centre as a Service CCCaaS

Andrew White at Contexta360 takes a look at the conscious contact centre as a service (CCCaaS), and predicting the future.

Today’s modern contact centre is amazingly complex, not only in technology but also in process. But – We have not seen anything yet.

Just as Moores model told us compute would double every two years, I believe we are witnessing even faster transformation in the way we will interact with our customers, prospects, patients and citizens.

However, Challenges Are Ahead…

Convergence and consolidation is happening in parallel. Ultimately, we are in a state of transition. The traditional contact centre came from a world of ‘call-control’.

The routing and management of inbound and outbound calls. Now we have to consider all media types and ways of providing the answers needed, human or automated.

Ultimately the data used to make these decisions and to provide the answers is massive, comes from many sources and is complex.

Practically every contact centre vendor promises a complete solution, but in reality we remain in a ‘integrated silo’ framework.

Yes, there are connections, API’s and dramatically improved interaction and sharing between silos, but in EVERY case, there is ‘add-on’ technology, either built or acquired to complete the brand vision. This is hard to manage, change and is static.

There is also a lot of vendors. Not only coming from the legacy contact vendor markets, but also new entrants.

Furthermore, the intelligence on the customer, prospect, patient or citizen is principally held in CRM, ERP or for more advanced environments the CDP, workforce management and analytics. I think of this as ‘What’s happening?’, ‘What’s happened?’ and ‘What’s likely to happen?”.

The contact centre is dealing with the Now. CRM, ERP, and systems of record primarily deal with what has happened, the history and relationship, and the CDP and analytics looks at the predictions, journeys, opportunities and risk by bringing in many more data-points and mining for insight, the future.

Knowledge and process also plays a big part, both electronic and human, and also internal and external. So it’s a Venn diagram of markets converging.

Ultimately, there are thousands of vendors. There are 10’s of thousands of technologies that are somewhat dis-integrated and there are too many for all to be viable, so consolidation is inevitable.

Change in customer relationship is also acceleration. Customer have choice. Customers are fickle. Never has it been more true to say -Customers are king. But the dynamics and variables in the market are increasing exponentially.

We live in a hyper fast, connected, big data world, so reacting manually will not work in the next 5 years – if not sooner.

So, What Will the Ingredients of the Future Contact Centre Include?

The capabilities will undergo a massive transformation over the coming years. We are so used to hearing terms like, multi-channel, omni-channel, chatbots, IVA, IVR, WFM, CRM, Knowledge management and the list goes on.

We have called many of these initiative ‘Digital strategy’ or ‘digital channels’. In reality, they have been digital connections and are merely functional capabilities and mainly solving inwardly focussed problems (Save money or remove work from us).

The next era of innovation will be outward focussed and cantered on system competence, system cognisance, system context and ultimately system Consciousness.

A.I will play a massive role in this. Today we see LLM’s and other sciences solving for end user transaction automation, or agent assistance.

Ultimately the A.I will move into the coordination and management of mass data within the entire system, not just the communication to the customer or agent.

AI fuelled CDP will likely be at the centre of this universe as they will capture and analyse every touch-point, mine the identity, context, customer journey and link this to knowledge, CX and RevOPS strategy and ultimately become the brain of a modern enterprise. A system that is dynamic, learns and puts the customer first.

Author: Guest Author