What’s shaping the future of contact centres?
By John Rocca, Director, Technical Product Management
The contact centre is at a time of change. The promise of new cloud capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI), and other modern technologies are causing major shifts in the industry, prompting enterprises to rethink the operations model, infrastructure and strategies underlying their contact centres.
Many leaders I’ve spoken to see these trends as cause for uncertainty. They want to know how customer and employee experiences will be impacted by moving to the cloud or embracing AI. They also want to know how to keep operations agile, cost-effective, secure and compliant.
These are all important issues to consider as enterprises navigate this evolution of contact centre operations. Here are key market trends affecting contact centres – and how you can prepare for whatever comes next.
Three key drivers influencing the evolution of the contact centre
Aging premises-based equipment
End-of-life technology poses a significant risk for businesses. Premises-based solutions require ongoing maintenance, including security updates and frequent upgrades – all of which come with a time and financial impact. This is especially true when vendors no longer update or support the equipment.
To simplify operations and management, many businesses are migrating to cloud contact-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions. This helps minimize total cost of ownership and overall cost-per-interaction, while improving business resilience and access to the latest innovative contact centre functionalities. Updating cloud solutions can be automatic, without the delays involved in upgrading premises-based equipment.
Reimagining customer and agent experiences with AI
By analyzing customer calls, AI-powered tools can give contact centre supervisors actionable and unbiased information for agent coaching, complaint reduction and overall cross-sell performance. In addition, these analytics can be delivered in real time so agents can receive more relevant and actionable information while they’re talking to customers. This helps accelerate resolution times and reduces call transfers, which can improve job satisfaction and reduce agent turnover – especially when agents work remotely.
Most customers prefer connecting to an agent quickly. You can reduce call volumes and accelerate time to resolution by deploying natural-sounding virtual agents that can answer the most common questions. More complex issues will route automatically to an agent with the appropriate expertise, without customers having to repeat information.
Organizations are already investing heavily in AI to realize benefits like these, with 72% understanding the importance of AI and machine learning to achieving business priorities.1 When integrated with your flexible cloud contact centre and business processes, AI-enabled analytics and virtual agents can be a real game changer in improving customer and agent satisfaction.
Many solutions make for difficult choices
There are a growing number of solutions to consider when moving to the cloud and leveraging AI for your contact centre, from CCaaS vendors such as Genesys and NICE to major cloud software vendors like Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
While trying to stand out with AI-enhanced features and other enticing capabilities, some software vendors offer all-in-one CCaaS and AI functionalities. Others have introduced application marketplaces that make it easy to integrate CCaaS solutions with hundreds of third-party applications and AI tools.
All this competition is good; it leads to better, higher-value products. This, however, can make it hard for businesses to determine what platform and at what point in their roadmap is it best suited for their contact centre needs.
Translating drivers into opportunities
The rise of these solutions gives you the opportunity to reach new levels of operational agility and cost savings. You can redefine the customer experience to drive business growth and revamp the employee experience to support greater performance and retention.
Your contact centre transformation partner
All this takes time and considerable expertise. Bell partners with leading CCaaS and AI vendors to help customers customize their contact centre roadmap and provide end-to-end managed solutions. Our Professional Services team brings more than 25 years of contact centre experience and over 250 experts with the knowledge to help you plan, design, deploy and support leading solutions. From defining the initial strategies and roadmaps to guiding your cloud migration and integrations with your existing environment, we can support your contact centre transformation every step of the way.
Find out how you can leverage cloud-based solutions and AI services for your contact centre.
Sources:
1. Frost and Sullivan: Top 10 Growth Opportunities in Customer Experience (CX), 2024