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The Contact Center of the Future
Instead of treating IP as simply enabling cost savings, companies are really looking at how it can drive business value—IP not as a means to an end, but as a catalyst to drive change.
That mission became clear at last week’s International Contact Center Management show, where many vendors told me that they’re customers are saying “I’m willing to make fundamental changes to the customer experience and the way I manage contact centers.” They say they plan to achieve this through an IP-enabled contact center—the contact center of the future.
Andy Pritchard, contact center lead partner for business consulting services at IBM, says the use of IP in the contact center going forward isn’t about enabling instant messaging, email, and virtual agents, it’s about integrating them so that they’re seamless. Imagine customers emailing an agent while seeing her on the screen. “The technology has caught up with the expectations,” Pritchard says. “We’re seeing pieces of the ‘contact center of the future’ being implemented. The contact centers have to go this way.”
This transformation isn’t just about enhancing the customers’ experiences, it’s about gaining a better understanding of individual customers by integrating their transactions and data. Wendy Lauther, vice president, of business operations at Verint, says this contact center of the future enables the integration of processes and data. “When there’s better understanding there’s better leveraging of that information,” she says.
Such integration, she adds, will change how companies can measure customer-focused metrics like first-call resolution. In most cases, this is the single hardest measure for companies because the linkage between transactions is happening across different channels. So if a customer calls the IVR, hangs up, but then calls back or goes to the Web to log a problem, the company cannot see those subsequent calls and its log of resolving the customers’ problems on the first call is actually incorrect. An IP-enabled contact center fixes that problem.
Kevin Hegebarth, director of strategic analysis at Witness Systems, says customers will receive consistent service. “They’ll get somebody knowledgeable,” he says. “By extending the call center into the enterprise, the enterprise is becoming keenly aware of customers’ needs.”
Is your organization’s contact center prepared for the adoption of IP to gain a better understanding of customers and to better leverage their information?
I believe we are a couple of years away from a fully integrated contact center delivery model where there is a common set of business rules to manage customer interactions across all channels. Clearly, the market is moving this way; it must if contact centers are expected to deliver value and organizations look to differentiate themselves from the competition by offering a compelling service experience. There are some analytics tool currently on the market that would allow a practitioner or analyst to understand on a 1-to-1 basis customer behavior across channels. That is definitely a plus but the opportunities are giving tyhe agents the empowerment to understand customer's cross-channel behavior in real time so that they have the insight to better apply different customer treatment rules based on the customer behavior demonstrated.