The pandemic has revealed the importance of the contact center in companies' business strategies. Customer care, telemarketing, sales of products and services or secure contactless payment channel are some of the functions of contact centers to drive sales and customer loyalty. But to offer a good customer experience, it is essential to focus on innovation and emerging technologies that allow immediate, personalized and unified attention, while improving efficiency and optimizing costs.

During the first state of alarm, technology allowed the contact center industry to adapt to teleworking in record time. Thus, companies were able to continue their business and the contact center, in many cases, became the only channel of contact between companies and customers.

The continuous perimeter confinements and the measures taken to alleviate the consequences of COVID-19 highlight the importance of the contact center in companies' business strategies. The incorporation of new channels - from chat, social networks or instant messaging applications, such as WhatsApp - its ability to adapt to contingency and unforeseen situations and the redefinition of the role - from customer service channel to sales and loyalty channel - have turned the contact center into a critical asset for companies.

Chatbots, callbots and virtual assistants

Designed to improve the quality of interactions between users and brands, conversational interfaces are redefining the contact center, call center and BPO industry.

Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have popularized the implementation of chatbots. Most of them are limited in scope and only interact with the user via text. Whereas voicebots converse with the user by voice thanks to their ability to understand natural language and automate recurring requests.

On the other hand, cognitive software with artificial intelligence and continuous training can start the interaction with the customer with an open question: How can I help you? They are designed to handle large volumes of requests, understand and process natural language, and either handle the user's request or forward the request to the most appropriate agency or agent.

However, managing customer expectations is critical to delivering a good experience. In the case of chatbots with frequently asked questions or enabled to respond to a number of specific requests, it is essential to inform the customer of the type of questions they can ask and refer the conversation to an agent for the rest of the requests.

The choice of the type of virtual assistant will depend on the volume of requests and the processes to be optimized to take advantage of the benefits of these solutions: cost savings, elimination of waiting times and increased customer satisfaction.

Juniper Research estimates that consumers and businesses will save more than 2.5 billion hours in telephone and social media interactions by implementing chatbots in customer service by 2023. It also forecasts that these solutions will save $11 billion for sectors such as retail, finance and healthcare by 2023.

Speech analytics

Associated with the implementation of cognitive software, among other functionalities, speech analytics solutions allow to know which types of queries are susceptible to be automated.

Knowing what type of requests are made by customers, the reason for them and the channels, reviewing the processes and identifying points for improvement are the main applications of speech analytics in the contact center. Definitely, understanding the customer to reduce queries, improve self-service and the customer experience.

Thus, Expedia managed to decrease the percentage of customers requesting assistance from 58% to 15%. By analyzing its contact center data, the travel site identified that out of every 100 customers who booked a trip, 58 subsequently called for help. Alone in 2012, they recorded 20 million calls from users requesting a copy of their itinerary. To solve this: they incorporated an IVR that gave customers the option to "press two to receive their itinerary", modified emails to prevent them from arriving in the spam box, and added the itinerary to a landing page.

Biometry

Biometrics uses the morphological features - fingerprint, voice or face - of the individual to corroborate a person's identity from a previous record.

Nowadays, the greatest penetration of biometrics is associated with mobile devices and fingerprints. Thus, it is already possible to authenticate identity without passwords or by reinforcing security with a double validation factor.

For its part, voice biometrics is in a more incipient phase. Its potential for use in the contact center is associated with the need to improve trust and security, guaranteeing compliance with the RGPD and the rights of users at all times.

Omnichannel software

Contact centers must have tools that integrate voice and text channels on a single platform. This ensures a unified, personalized and frictionless experience regardless of the contact channel.

Cloud communications

Anywhere access and rapid deployment of cloud technology has positioned the cloud as a critical asset for contact centers. Few contact centers do not trust cloud communications, either their own or from third parties. Gartner estimates that the contact center as a service will be the preferred adoption model for 50% of organizations by 2022.

The most advanced contact centers in digital transformation will be able to optimize costs, improve customer experience and turn their contact center into a key element of their sales and customer relationship strategy.

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your contact center?

An Alisys specialist will contact you to analyze your contact center processes and define how technology can help you optimize them. Request a session here.