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Hosted Contact Centers Anticipate Gains in Next 10 Years

Hosted Contact Centers Anticipate Gains in Next 10 Years

July 28, 2014
By TMCnet Staff

At the heart of the call center, the phone is still the primary source of contact between customers and agents. With the introduction of the Internet, smart mobile devices, and personal computers, customers now have access to multiple channels in which they can get in touch with an agent. The industry has been evolving by adapting the latest technology in order to continue to be the best available method of interacting with customers without becoming difficult. But customers still want more, and the future looks like it is going to provide these options.


In a recent piece posted on the daily.co.uk by Gregoire Vigroux, the title simply says, "The Contact Center of Tomorrow," and considering the changes that have taken place in the industry in the last 40 years, predicting what would likely come in the next 10 years or more is going to be quite difficult.

As Vigroux notes, "The contact center of 2014 is already almost unrecognizable from the call center of 1984, 1994, even 2004." He believes several key changes in the future will affect the industry. They are: contact centers will be multinational; staff attrition will be yesterday’s problem: the arrival of Generation Y; and corporate culture will be the key to success.

Those are all valid points, but to some degree they are already taking shape, and it won't take much prognostication to see them come to fruition. The need for survival by center operators will dictate that they adapt or perish.

A whitepaper prepared by Andrew Pritchard and Raj Mirchandani for IBM (News - Alert) Global Services titled, "The Contact Center of the Future Paper" was very optimistic and futuristic about the technology that will be running call centers. It was written in 2006, but not all of the concepts they suggested have been fully applied by call centers.

This is just one of the examples the paper highlights regarding the way in which future customers will be interacting with the call center:

A customer calls and it is authenticated with voice print analysis, eliminating the need for using account numbers and passwords.

Natural language interface asks customer to state the reason he or she is calling and provides answers without ever going to a live agent. Removing the first-line of support has already saved the company a significant amount of money. The speech recognition is used to capture additional data which is used to address high value core problem-solving skills by agents.

When the system senses it’s time to talk to an agent after analyzing the customer response including level of frustration, it is passed on to an agent who has been prepped through an intuitive Knowledge Management system that provides everything there is to know about the customer.

After the problem is resolved, an automated analysis and follow-up calls are initiated to ensure everything is OK, and the information is archived and used to train future call center agents.

New technologies will be available in 10 years that will probably not be implemented in call centers immediately. Just like the IBM whitepaper proves, the ideas they had in 2006 are just beginning to be part of the call center environment. But the industry is maturing, and more customer centric consumers are demanding and will continue to demand the latest technology. All we have to do now is wait to see if call center agents will be talking to us during commercial breaks on our smart TVs, recommend what we see through our smart glass and even sing us a lullaby if we can't go to sleep. 





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