Monitoring trends and changes in technology is critical to stay ahead of the curve and be ready for changes that happen quickly. Nowhere is this more important than in the Call Center. A recent release distributed in BusinessWire, shares 10 specific technology trends to watch for in 2018. We’d like to share some of the trends that we feel will have the greatest impact on Centris and the call center industry as a whole.
2018 TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT MAY IMPACT THE CALL CENTER
The first trend that we believe can significantly impact the contact center is AI Foundation. Here’s what Gartner says about this topic:
Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously will be a major battleground for technology vendors through at least 2020. The ability to use AI to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience will drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025.
“AI techniques are evolving rapidly and organizations will need to invest significantly in skills, processes and tools to successfully exploit these techniques and build AI-enhanced systems,” said Mr. Cearley. “Investment areas can include data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation. Multiple constituencies including data scientists, developers and business process owners will need to work together.”
Automation is everywhere, and the call center has seen enormous growth in self-service and AI over the past several years. According to Christie Schneider of IBM, AI-powered automated customer service is the future. In a recent article, she proposes that:
- By 2020, 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without a human agent
- Resolving customer service issues before they arise could significantly lower customer abandonment rates
- AI, chatbots and automated, self-service technologies free up call center employees from routine tier-1 support requests so they can focus on more complex tasks
The second trend that we’d like to look at is Intelligent Apps and Analytics. Here’s what Gartner says about that:
Over the next few years, virtually every app, application and service will incorporate some level of AI. Some of these apps will be obvious intelligent apps that could not exist without AI and machine learning. Others will be unobtrusive users of AI that provide intelligence behind the scenes. Intelligent apps create a new intelligent intermediary layer between people and systems and have the potential to transform the nature of work and the structure of the workplace.
“Explore intelligent apps as a way of augmenting human activity and not simply as a way of replacing people,” said Mr. Cearley. “Augmented analytics is a particularly strategic growing area which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing for a broad range of business users, operational workers and citizen data scientists.”
AI has become the next major battleground in a wide range of software and service markets, including aspects of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Packaged software and service providers should outline how they’ll be using AI to add business value in new versions in the form of advanced analytics, intelligent processes and advanced user experiences.
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) may enhance the analytics used to help contact centers track data that will be used to monitor call center performance and improve the customer experience. Any tool that can help us do our job better and improve customer experience is something that we would consider implementing in our day to day operations.
The third trend that could impact the contact center in 2018 is that of the Conversational Platform. Here’s what Gartner says about this up and coming trend:
Conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with the digital world. The burden of translating intent shifts from user to computer. The platform takes a question or command from the user and then responds by executing some function, presenting some content or asking for additional input. Over the next few years, conversational interfaces will become a primary design goal for user interaction and be delivered in dedicated hardware, core OS features, platforms and applications.
“Conversational platforms have reached a tipping point in terms of understanding language and basic user intent, but they still fall short,” said Mr. Cearley. “The challenge that conversational platforms face is that users must communicate in a very structured way, and this is often a frustrating experience. A primary differentiator among conversational platforms will be the robustness of their conversational models and the application programming interface (API) and event models used to access, invoke and orchestrate third-party services to deliver complex outcomes.”
Conversational platforms can include Live Chat and various forms of Social Media. Here at Centris, Live Chat is one of the primary tools we use to communicate with customers. At this point, we find Live Chat to be efficient, accurate and a reliable way to converse since it provides a written record of the interaction. If these types of platforms are predicted to be more robust and offer even more flexibility and accuracy, this will only improve the customer experience.
As we move into 2018, we will be closely monitoring these and any other trends that may hold the potential for providing a better customer experience. However, here at Centris, our technology is always viewed as a tool to assist our agents in doing their jobs; it is never seen as a substitute for human contact, which is the essence of customer service.
If you’d like to know more about how Centris can enhance your customer service, contact us. We’d love a chance to design a customized solution for your business.
