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The Contact Center in Its Current Form is Finished
By Chris Ezekiel,
Founder & CEO, Creative Virtual
The contact center in its current form is finished. At
first this may sound like a shocking statement, but take a look at your
customer base. There is a generational change taking place, with a new
generation of customers spending more time having text conversations with their
friends and loved ones than actually talking to them. The last thing they want
to do is pick up the phone and speak to your company or get into a lengthy
email exchange to have an issue resolved.
Today’s customers want effortless interactions with your
organization. Research shows that customers are increasingly leveraging
self-service and digital channels for customer service for
this reason. The traditional model for call centers and contact centers is no
longer providing the experience customers have started to demand, and customers
aren’t hesitating to take their business elsewhere when their service and
support expectations are not being met.
While this contact center change won’t happen overnight, the
industry is already starting to see a transition to more automation. For many
companies, this requires not only the implementation of new technologies but
also a vital shift in attitudes toward customer engagement. This paradigm shift
offers organizations enormous opportunities on the cost savings and sales front,
too. It will be important to work with a solution provider that truly
understands the changing customer experience landscape and can provide both the
expertise and technological innovation to guide your organization through these
changes.
This transition has also coincided with a renewed interest
in chatbots and virtual agents, in part due to Facebook’s introduction of bots
for their Messenger Platform this year, and with that an
explosion of suppliers claiming to provide these solutions for customer
support. However, many of these new chatbots are designed as channel-specific
solutions which can disrupt organizations’ efforts to provide seamless
omnichannel engagement. So while virtual agents are an ideal way to provide
digital self-service, companies must implement them in ways that complement
the end-to-end customer experience.
So how can companies properly manage the transition to
automation in their contact centers? They should look to a combination of virtual
and real support with a central knowledge management and workflow platform. For
customers, the combination of natural language virtual agents with live chat
means seamless interactions. For contact centers, a central knowledgebase and
feedback loop that are linked with workflow functionality means the ability to
keep information up-to-date and consistent across all self-service and
human-assisted support channels.
Having the proper integrations in place is key for
providing effortless, personalized support experiences and allowing customers
to seamlessly transition across channels and devices. Virtual agents and
chatbots should be integrated with personalized account information so that
logged-in or authenticated users receive responses specific to them. Customers
should have the flexibility to seamlessly escalate from virtual agent to live
chat agent within the same application and have their conversation history
passed over for a continuous experience. Failure to do so will drive your
customers straight to your competition. In fact, a poor customer experience due
to siloed customer engagement is predicted to be one of the top
three causes for customer dissatisfaction through 2020.
A central knowledgebase for all contact channels is
important for organizations to keep their experience consistent. This builds
confidence with customers because they’ll know that no matter how they choose
to engage – self-service, live chat, phone call – they are receiving consistent
information. Accuracy of that information is also a top priority, so
implementing a feedback loop that allows live agents to provide feedback and
suggestions on content in real-time is important. Linking the feedback loop
with the centralized knowledgebase and workflow functionality enables the
automatic creation of a change request associated with the corresponding piece
of content. The suggestions can then be easily reviewed, updates made quickly
and the correct information deployed for customers and agents across channels.
This innovative feedback loop empowers live agents to constantly improve the
virtual agent just by doing their normal jobs and is defining
industry best practice.
The bottom line: As seamless, personalized smart
assistants increasingly automate everything the current contact center offers,
organizations need to turn to the combination of virtual and real support to
create happy and loyal customers.