How to Stay Innovative in the Contact Centre

David Schneider, guest speaker at Spearline, argues that contact centres have to stay innovative and need to keep up with the rapidly evolving tech industry.

This means constantly coming up with new ideas to keep up with and ideally ahead of other tech industries and contact centres. Below are a number of recent contact centre innovations that pushed the boundaries of the industry.

One of the ongoing issues with contact centres is the complexity of the entire contact process. Most agents have extremely busy schedules, so quick and effective communication is key. Having excellent call quality is vital to ensure that customers have the best possible experience.

Contact centres need to keep the customer happy, as it is easy for the customer to jump to a different centre if they are at all unhappy with the experience.

In the past, customers could only reach contact centres through a rigidly routed voice-only channel. This caused many inconveniences for people who were trying to call. Fortunately, this is no longer the case as there are now multiple different paths of communication for people to get in contact with a centre, such as chat, phone, and email options.

One option that can be particularly great for technical support contact centres is video. Some video vendors provide a disruptive platform for intelligent visual support in contact centres. This is basically an augmented reality scenario which allows the contact agent to see exactly what is happening on the customer’s screen, this allows the agent to visually guide the customer to a solution.

Approaches like this are great for more complex issues that need to be resolved for the customer, but when it comes to basic issues, sometimes the use of AI may be more ideally suited than a human agent.

This is where apps from certain contact centre technology vendors come into play, which allow recurring customer interactions to be automated over chat.

These apps use AI to help customers with any basic or service issues. It will also send push notifications to alert the customer of any issues that need their attention.

The technology innovations highlighted so far deal with the customer in uniquely innovative ways, but there are contact centre companies that deal with the contact centres directly themselves and provide a cloud-based customer support system.

What this does is allow a company to set up its own call centre within a few minutes, allowing small start-up companies to set up their own call centre without having to pay for equipment or exorbitant start-up costs.

Another benefit is that you can control all this from your smartphone, including the ability to add teammates to your dashboard, purchase multiple phone numbers and many other things.

Like other companies, contact centres have to review their analytics to get details on their customer service insights. This is where analytics vendors come in. They will provide technology that collects data and information from all the different channels such as complaints, surveys, emails, etc.

This information is then structured into comprehensive analytics. This is incredibly helpful to companies, as over 85% of corporate data is unstructured, making turning unstructured data into an intelligible data a daunting task.

David Schneider

The technologies and applications mentioned above are only a few of the numerous ways contact centres are making innovative strides in the field.

Companies will continue to innovate and improve the process of customer service. There are exciting opportunities in the future for the contact centre industry.

For more information, visit www.spearline.com

Author: Robyn Coppell