ISG Provider Lens™ Contact Center / Customer Experience Services Archetype Report 2019
Contact Center Of The Future And Evolving Customer Experience Journey
What does the contact center of the future look like?
The contact center of the future lies in personalized services. As speed, accuracy, agility and accessibility are becoming prime requirements, consumers dictate how they want to interact with the brand and not the other way around.
Customer retention, loyalty and stickiness are highly dependent on the quality of services delivered and on whether the services offered today are rapid, relevant and personalized.
Customer centricity is the renewed focus of contact center services. Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way customer services are being delivered. Analytics is empowering agents to deliver better and personalized services to customers. Digital technologies are here to stay, bring process improvements and mainly to augment human interaction. As the number of interactions increases across non-voice channels, it is important for enterprises to build their strategy on the utilization of these channels, capturing information and seamlessly transferring it across channels.
CRAWL
Customer Service
Agent-driven, voice calls, objective is query resolution
WALK
Customer Engagement
Multiple channels, omnichannel experience, seamless journey, know your customer better, quick query resolution, cloud enablement for contact centers, social media integration
RUN
Customer Experience
Enriched customer journey, personalization, intelligent engagement, AI and cognitive technology, automation, self service, bots, avatars, self-help videos, analytics, sales, marketing, customer-centric business model
TRANSFORM
Customer Experience Transformation
Holistic engagement to transform customer experience, adopt the right tools and technologies, implement omnichannel, advanced analytics for improvised personalization, adoption of automation and AI to empower agents, cloud adoption for real time access, long term strategic goals to enrich customer experience.
The journey of contact center has evolved from crawl, walk and run to transformation. Moving away from the piecemeal approach of traditional “agents on the seat” model to end-to-end journey, enterprises are keen to look at this entire approach from the end user’s perspective. In order to achieve the desired customer experience results, companies are relying on experts to design their strategy by reimagining and re-engineering the customer journey as well as identifying areas that can drive enhanced operational efficiencies and ensure preparedness for the future.
The contact center of the future should address the following aspects to experience the true epitome of evolution:
- Instant — Utilization of chatbots or virtual agents to serve customers 24/7 when agents are not available.
- Digital — Support offered by contact centers must be digitized.
- Easy — Providing customers with anywhere/anytime access and ease of availability of any information that they seek.
- Personalized — A key requirement for contact centers to survive; customizing the offerings or services is quintessential to deal with digital-first generations.
To achieve the above, contact centers of the future are making notable changes in the following areas:
Understanding the customer
The journey of revolutionizing customer services cannot be initiated without understanding the needs of customers. With the growing importance to map the customer journey and better understand their needs, contact centers are making investments to strengthen their consulting offerings, particularly in design thinking, end-user research and innovation labs.
Human interaction continuing to decline but not facing elimination
Digital channels are increasing, cheaper to run than voice and are easily accessible. Voice calls continue to decline and interactions with agents/virtual agents over digital channels are rising. However, human involvement is pertinent to complete the interaction, particularly in handling complex tasks.
According to ISG Research™, the role of an agent will see a significant shift and narrow down to three main types, depending on complexity. These roles will be augmented by AI and analytics. The three main types are:
- Exception handler: Handles or manages data that do not fall under any automation channel.
- Multi-discipline handler: Handles tasks that are not automated yet and are usually complex.
- Deep domain experts: Specialized in a single domain and help customers resolve queries that are typically very complex in nature and require highly specialized skills.
Uptake in intelligent assistants in contact centers
AI is a game changer in the contact center industry and is witnessing a surge in adoption. The technology will immensely augment customer interactions pertaining to human quality, self-service or chatbots. AI has huge potential to replicate human-like behavior, understand customer needs and answer appropriately without human intervention. Conversational AI is ready for prime time; it is moving beyond prototypes and rapidly progressing into the implementation of production-ready products.
According to ISG Research™, technologies such as intelligent Q&A, virtual agents and chatbots are grouped as intelligent assistants and are actively being adopted in contact centers. The following illustration depicts the various technologies and their ability to interact in a personalized way via voice or text. This is based on the number of channels the technologies can operate on and the number of tasks they can perform as per their complexity.
Self-service to intelligent self-service
Given its faster turnaround and quick response time, self-service is emerging as one of the popular channels among most customers. With technology enablement such AI, traditional self-service portals have evolved into more than just robotic automation such as interactive voice response (IVR). These portals are highly intelligent crowd drivers and form a knowledge management hub that can predict patterns and pull out information that is most relevant.
Social media strategy and management
Social media is an important and dominant tool for customer engagement. A popularly evolving channel, the technology is gaining popularity, particularly among millennials. One of the critical aspects of growing and managing a brand is a well-defined social media strategy. From product support, query resolution, sales and inquiry, a large chunk of queries are being routed through this channel. It is pertinent for organizations to adopt an effective management strategy for social media in order to improve customer experience.