To Infinity & Beyond: 4 Trends Defining the Future of Contact Centres

How to harness the power of emerging contact centre trends to provide customer service that anticipates the needs of today’s consumers.

U.S. Civil War president Abraham Lincoln once said, “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” While it’s easy to get swept away by the day-to-day demands of running a bustling contact centre, it’s equally important to remember that each day that passes without investing in improving customer service for the future is a day wasted due to untapped potential.

When negotiating your present competing goals of providing top-notch customer service while maximizing efficiency and keeping costs manageable, it’s important to pay attention to emerging trends that will leave your client service centre in the dark ages if you fail to invest in improving and upgrading technology and processes. Here are four emerging contact centre trends that smart managers are investing in now in order to remain competitive today and victorious tomorrow.

1. Greater Consumer Adoption of Multichannel Service Routes

According to research from Synthetix, 75 percent of consumers believe that businesses should provide answers to their most frequently asked questions exclusively via mobile Web on their smartphones. Got that? That means three quarters of all your clients believe they shouldn’t have to involve the call centre at all for their most common inquiries. And that’s what they believe today! Imagine what those numbers will look like in a few short years. Smart contact centre managers are prepared to provide excellent customer service with a multichannel mindset, including social media, live chat, IVR for telephone service, and even text messaging. If you’re neglecting the multichannel approach, you may be missing out; the research shows that more consumers are showing preferences for multiple access points to answers for their most common questions.

2. Cloud-Based Client Service

Are you in denial that cloud-based infrastructure is the wave of the future? If so, you risk providing prehistoric customer service. Cloud-based client service centres are not only streamlined and far less costly, but they also allow for maximum efficiency because of their scalability and compatibility with remote and third party contact centre providers. In the cloud, answers and services are more rapidly deployed, and customer data is instantly accessible from anywhere by anyone with secure access to the system. Talk about operating at light speed!

3. Unification of Consumer Data Collection

While your organization is segmented into operations, production, management, and customer service departments, the customer doesn’t view it that way. They equate your telephone customer service with your products and services themselves, meaning accurate capture of customer data at every point of contact is critical. Be sure your agents have access to the complete consumer history by employing advanced telephone service software and giving yourself a smart control panel that allows you seamless access to agents’ calls and customers’ purchasing histories. Without a seamless experience, your company will be operating in the era of the Flintstones while your competition comes off looking like the Jetsons.

4. Ultramodern Metrics

Careful capture of data on KPIs and other customer service metrics is a must-have for the ultramodern contact centre. Be sure you are getting good data and then benchmarking it against competitors in your field and not just randomly chosen performance standards that aren’t particularly applicable for your specific industry. Think you have great information on metrics like FCR, service level, hold time, and more? Consider this statistic from Inova Solutions, a contact centre software and hardware producer; in 2013, only 43 percent of client service centres had adequate understanding of various KPIs and contact centre metrics. If you don’t know what you’re working with and what your competitors are achieving, how can you possibly stay competitive now or in the future?

Investing in modernizing and upgrading your contact centre service model shouldn’t be thought of as optional. In today’s light-speed economy, consumers are accustomed to instant answers and speedy service. The company that foregoes focusing on future trends risks falling by the wayside. For more information on how to ensure you’re providing service that meets or exceeds consumer expectations, read our free white paper.