The technologies driving the digital transformation
The digital transformation for contact centers isn’t just a buzz-term; rather, it involves a range of technologies at its core. Key players in digital transformation, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, automation, and analytics, are instrumental in shaping the future of contact centers.
Cloud Contact Center
Having all of the applications your contact center uses to operated fully in the cloud allows all of the customer data to be in one location, giving leaders the ability to analyze and act on it, including customer feedback from voice calls. Without a fully cloud-based contact center, implementing other digital technologies may be impossible or difficult to utilize.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) for contact centers is an emerging branch of technologies that help increase agent efficiency and provide actionable analysis into insight supervisors have never had before. Lets look at a few ways contact centers are utilizing AI in their contact centers.
Intelligent Routing
In older IVR (interactive voice response) systems, customers were forced to choose the route they wanted to go by selecting a phone number that would correspond to a route (i.e. push 4 for billing). In new IVA (Intelligent Voice Automation) systems, administrators deploy customized models that are labeled by trained algorithm, but can continuously improve over time based on the feedback of agents. The pandemic of 2020 pushed many organizations to move to the evolved, smarter routing systems to meet growing demands.
Chatbots
Chatbots are most commonly used to greet, collect background information and help solve simple problems. Although helpful for simple, self-service problem solving, they have a limited scope of programmed information they can understand and what they can say, which may lead to frustration. Organizations evaluating a full, digital transformation may see chatbots fitting into the puzzle for answering FAQ type questions and gathering the preliminary information before connecting to a live representative.
Insightful Analysis
AI-powered analysis gives businesses helpful insight into information they can act on that could never be done without the move to digital. Contact centers can now analyze customer sentiment or behavior and create touchpoints before losing the customer.
Omni-Channel Orchestration
Customers expect to seamlessly move from one channel to the next without having to remind you who they are, what they use your services for and how they like to interact with your brand. Your customers don’t care that synchronizing all of their interactions requires integration of technologies, databases and customizations.
Customers are often not using a single touchpoint with your brand before achieving a specific goal. For example, a customer may see an ad on a social media channel, chat with a bot on your website, talk with a virtual assistant, all before reaching a human interaction.
Orchestrating the abundance of touchpoints in the background in a seamless way to delight customers is helping brands stand out among their peers and increase their brand loyalty with lifelong customers.
While implementing one or a few of these technologies will positively impact productivity, revenue and agent satisfaction, moving towards a roadmap that includes several will ensure your contact center is getting the most out of the cutting edge technologies available.
