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2021 - The Year of the Contact Center
2021 is off to a rocky start as countries struggle to roll
out the vaccines needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Human ingenuity will
triumph over adversity and ineptitude. If scientists around the world
could develop a series of vaccines for a previously unknown virus in less than
9 months, governments should be able to figure out how to distribute and
administer it efficiently, though this is a complex logistics and distribution
challenge for which there are proven solutions.
The world has changed in the past year, in many cases for
the better, and so must businesses and their service organizations. Contact
centers all over the world were forced to accelerate their digital
transformation the moment the lockdown hit, as the alternative was not an
option. Everything that could go virtual did, and the businesses that had this
option were the lucky ones, unlike some of their peers in the entertainment and
retail world.
Contact centers around the world have positioned themselves
to come out of the pandemic stronger than they went in. These departments and
their leaders and employees have displayed courage and grace under fire, acting
as the first responders for their companies. When no one else was available to
help customers, contact center staff was there to respond to inquiries, using
whatever means they had available in their home-based workspaces. The digital
transformation happened seemingly overnight in many contact centers when their
employees were sent home to work. The cloud carried the day in many companies,
demonstrating its agility, flexibility and reliability under great duress.
The question is what the next stage will be for contact
centers. Are they going to revert to what they were prior to the pandemic or
build on the amazing foundation of change that occurred in record time during
the last year, even if it was long overdue? This is exactly what DMG asked
enterprise, IT and contact centers leader from around the world in our annual
contact center goals and priority survey, conducted in November and December
2020. We expected insightful responses, and the results did not disappoint. DMG
asked executives three brief questions, as we were concerned that the mood amid
the challenges of the coronavirus was not appropriate for lengthy surveys, and
we were pleased when they responded. The three questions were:
What are your top contact center priorities for 2021?
(Select all that apply)
What are your top technology priorities for 2021? (Select
all that apply)
After the pandemic is over, are you going to have some/all
contact center/customer service employees work from home?
Figure 1 shows the top five answers selected for the first
question about top contact center priorities for 2021. 65.8% of survey
respondents indicated the importance of prioritizing the customer experience.
They made the point, as they have in prior years that everything else should be
addressed within this framework. Based on the next few answers, it’s clear that
enterprises and their contact center leadership are eager to move forward with
initiatives in which they hesitated to invest in prior years. The second-ranked
response was to improve customer-facing self-service capabilities, as reflected
by 44.7% of respondents. Improving productivity came in third with 36% of the
responses, and reducing operating costs came in fourth, as reflected by 34.2%
of respondents. These three initiatives are highly interrelated and involve
major changes and investments throughout the enterprise. Companies are
transitioning from their interactive voice response (IVR) systems to next-gen conversational
intelligent virtual agents (IVAs). What makes this change so compelling is that
it is happening in many channels and touchpoints throughout the enterprise, not
just in the contact center. The fifth-ranked contact center priority for 2021
is implementing/enhancing the work-at-home program, which does not come as a
surprise; 29.8% of survey respondents selected this initiative as a priority
for 2021. As importantly, when DMG directly asked survey respondents if they
were going to have some/all contact center/customer service employees work from
home after the pandemic was over, an overwhelming 86% of them said yes.
Figure 1: Top 5 Contact Center Priorities for 2021
Source: DMG Consulting LLC, January 2021
Figure 2 displays the top 5 answers for the second question
about top technology priorities for 2021. Not surprisingly, self-service
solutions (IVR, IVA, web and/or mobile) was the top response, as reflected by
51.8% of respondents. Self-service was slowly becoming the customer channel of
choice before the pandemic, and adoption of these solutions was accelerated
during the past year, as self-service proved to be the fastest and most
convenient channel in which to receive responses, when the solutions were well
designed and delivered.
The second-place category, receiving 39.5% of responses, was
cloud-based contact center systems and applications. Given the major
contributions of the cloud in enabling contact centers during the pandemic, the
momentum of companies transitioning to this deployment/financing model is expected
to continue. The cloud is being viewed as an essential enabler of contact
center digital transformation.
Speech and text analytics (also known as interaction
analytics, IA), came in third place, receiving 35.1% of the responses.
Interaction analytics has been one of the unsung heroes of the pandemic. Its
ability to structure and find insights and customer needs and wants in spoken
and text-based conversations made it instrumental in helping executives be
responsive to their customers when there was no other way of obtaining this
data. Adoption of IA will pick up momentum in contact centers and is expected
to see greater adoption throughout enterprises.
Reporting and analytics, which garnered 28.1% of survey
responses, has shown up in the top 10 list of contact center technology
investments for all of the years that DMG has done this study. Contact center
leaders continue to look for more effective reporting tools, to improve their
ability to perform their job and improve contact center operations.
The fifth-place investment priority, analytics-enabled
quality management (AQM), was cited in 27.2% of the responses. Analytics-enabled
QM is an application of IA, so on a combined basis, these two items received a
striking 62.3% of the responses. DMG expects companies to adopt AQM as a phase
in their digital transformation, as it is a powerful and highly effective tool
for keeping track of what agents are doing, how well they are adhering to
internal policies and procedures, as well as if they are properly addressing
customers (soft skills).
Figure 2: Top 5 Contact Center Technology Priorities for 2021
Source: DMG Consulting LLC, January 2021
Final Thoughts
You’ve made it through 2020, and 2021 is expected to be a much better year. The tough times are not fully behind us, but the world is on the path to recovery. Contact centers have been instrumental in helping companies endure through the worst of the times and are again making major contributions by helping organizations schedule and manage the roll-out of vaccinations. Due to their agility and responsiveness, contact centers are coming out of the pandemic with more respect than they went in, positioning these essential customer-facing departments to play an increasingly important role in corporations in the future. (Click here to see the complete survey of contact center and technology priorities for 2021.)