Call Center Management Featured Article
Top Call Center Industry Predictions
Call centers are customer service driven, and of the utmost importance is how to better serve the customer; seeing what they want and how to deliver. As technology continually evolves, it can help to make the call center industry much more efficient and effective. It is hard to know exactly what people desire, which is why there are thought leaders that can help guide call center management in the right direction.
What seems to be the most important to consumers, according to Forbes, is video customer service. Customers no longer care to spend hours on the phone, talking to some agent – not that it was ever that appealing in the past. Now, they want face-to-face interaction, which helps with customer service efficiency. For example: if there is a maintenance issue where you live. Utilizing video calling can help better assess the problem to see if there is a need for a technician to come to the premises, thus saving gas, money, time, and effort for a job that can be done remotely.
There is also the concept that response times will shift to real time as we are an on-demand society. Consumers do not want to wait around for an hour or two to get an answer from a call center; consumers want it instantaneously. With the consistent development of apps, this is becoming a reality. Customers can check wait times, request real time call backs, and receive concrete responses to queries.
Finally, and this is a prediction that we can see on an everyday level: messaging will continue to be the preferred method or channel to deal with call centers. Predictions estimate that the apps space will reach $128 billion by 2022, as of the time of this writing there are four billion global and active messaging app users. Sadly, companies are saying they can no longer afford to support messaging options but many now offer the option of live chat to meet the growing self-service demand and improve customer service overall.
These are merely a few predictions for the call center industry, but this arena is constantly evolving and will continue to do so via innovation.