Sabio’s Founding Director, Adam Faulkner highlights the 10 top technology trends that he believes will drive best practice customer engagement.
Building on major industry shifts such as mobile, social, cloud and Big Data, Adam emphasizes the transformative role that technology needs to play in improving service performance levels – as well as unlocking real operational savings within customer service operations.
Top 10 Technology Trends:
1. Mobile Apps Set to Bypass Traditional IVR Processes
Smartphones and mobile apps now give users the chance to bypass traditional IVR processes and start interactions straight away. Mobile apps combine with services such as callback and web chat to make engagement even easier for customers.
2. Web-enabled Omnichannel Engagement
Today’s consumers are more demanding than ever, using ‘always-on’ multiple digital channels to interact, connect, share and shop. Organizations that provide consumers with a seamless, omnichannel delivery will have an advantage going forward.
3. Equipping Agents to Deliver Social Media Support
While voice remains the primary touch point for many, organizations are increasingly relying on the contact center to manage other contact channels such as social media. The key to success here is making sure agents have the tools in place and the training to resolve issues quickly.
4. Putting Big Data to Work
Today’s contact centers generate essential Big Data feeds including ACD data, CRM systems, call & screen recordings, customer feedback, speech analytics outputs, and social media inputs to external databases. Technologies such as web and speech analytics will unlock the value inherent in unstructured contact center data.
5. Virtual Agents
When it comes to successfully challenging contact center demand, one innovation set to have an impact is the use of virtual, task-oriented assistants for enterprise. Unlike personal assistant technologies such as Apple’s Siri, enterprise personal assistants can offer real domain expertise thanks to close knowledge base integration.
6. Optimized ‘Contact Us’ strategies
More organizations will challenge demand levels by deploying Embedded Service solutions on their websites to streamline engagement. The goal is to pre-qualify queries – ideally resolving them with relevant information, removing the need for formal contact. Adopting such an approach requires a well-integrated customer contact infrastructure, but the benefits are significant in terms of challenging demand.
7. Seamless Contact Center Security
Contact centers are often caught in the middle of the growing conflict between the compliance and customer service functions of a business. The application of innovative technologies – such as voice biometrics and speech analytics – can help achieve compliance goals while still delivering a level of seamless customer service.
8. Acting on Customer Feedback
Capturing customer feedback is great, but it’s what you do with it that really distinguishes an organisation. There are multiple ways of collecting feedback, however it’s essential not just to collect scores but also capture customer comments to gain a sense of what customers actually think.
9. Knowledge Management
Effective Knowledge Management plays a critical role when it comes to addressing customer queries online – particularly when it’s powered by near real-time knowledge base updates from the contact center. Look for more organisations taking this approach.
10. More Effective Call Steering
Bad IVR systems can undo multiple productivity gains – often leading to increases in transfer rates of up to 10%. Streamlining the experience by applying intelligent routing to each stage of the process will contribute directly to an improved customer experience.
About the Author
Adam Faulkner is Founding Director of Sabio, a specialist customer service and contact centre systems integrator focused on delivering exceptional customer contact strategies and solutions based on best-of-breed technologies from leading partners such as Avaya, Nuance and Verint. Sabio offers business consulting, systems integration and managed services, and has worked with many major organizations.
