What are the primary factors that drive growth in the Contact Center? This is a question that we ask and explore on a regular basis since we are part of an industry that changes rapidly. Like many, the contact center industry is driven by technology, so we change and grow as technology changes and grows. An article published late last year looked at trends expected for the contact center in 2018. Here’s a look at some of the highlights of this article as well as some of our real-world experiences.
FACTORS DRIVING GROWTH
Omni-channel Communications: Omni-channel refers to the ability for the customer to reach your contact center across multiple channels, such as phone, e-mail, SMS, Live Chat and Social Media. Just a few short years ago, Omni-channel communication in the call center was a “nice-to-have” as customers were becoming more accustomed to new platforms that were growing. Now, omni-channel communications is a “must-have” as customers have come to expect it in their daily communications. Contact centers that offer seamless multi-channel communication going forward will likely see higher levels of customer retention and customer satisfaction than contact centers who fall behind in this area of growth.
Mediarouting: Part of the omni-channel experience is Mediarouting. Mediarouting takes the multiple channels of SMS, voice, chat and e-mail and routes them through a unified queue to the appropriate agent. From a contact center perspective, this would likely require software updates in order to accommodate this task. Efficiency and cost savings efforts are behind this factor, as the more channels a single representative can support, the lower the cost.
Mobile Applications: We’ve seen this explode in the last few years. There is a mobile app for practically everything now and this trend is not going away. This is likely to be one of the biggest areas of growth going forward. Banks, Insurance Agencies, airlines, doctor’s offices and more provide customers with the means of communicating via mobile app. Airlines offer check-in, banks offer mobile banking, doctors’ offices offer appointment confirmations and insurance companies offer claims processing via mobile app. For the contact center, mobile apps open up a new avenue of analytics to track and understand. At Centris, what we see now and going forward, is that mobile apps are very popular with younger customers. Therefore, in five to ten years, this will be a primary channel in the contact center.
Multi-channel bots: Bots, which is another way of saying Artificial Intelligence, is another area of growth in the contact center. Bots can take in some basic information from the customer and then transfer that customer to the appropriate agent. Bots can also be helpful in analyzing certain data for the call center.
What we find interesting about these trends is that each are designed to enhance the customer experience. Here at Centris, we welcome technology that allows us to better serve our partners as well as their customers; for us, the customer experience is central to everything we do. While technology plays a vital role in our industry, it can never fully replace the human connection and the agent’s ability to speak one-on-one with a customer. If you’re looking for a contact center that offers efficiency along with a superb customer experience, contact us; we’d love to work with you.
