4 Technologies Advancing the Contact Center Industry

By Special Guest
Bernadine Racoma
  |  June 18, 2019



As businesses today become more dependent on technology, it is imperative that companies keep abreast of every innovation. One of the many areas of business operations that have benefited significantly from technology is customer communication. Today, keeping in touch with customers in various ways has become an essential business practice. More and more companies are seeing the importance of making sure that communication lines with customers remain open.

Contact centers around the world have also undergone massive changes due to innovation. One technology that was instrumental in revolutionizing customer communication was VoIP. By doing away with conventional phone lines, the best VoIP services provide business clients with exceptional service, tons of features, and affordable prices. In many ways, VoIP may be considered the pinnacle of communication technology, and there is more to look forward to as technology keeps advancing.

Along with VoIP, there are many technological innovations responsible for changing how businesses provide customer service. Here are four examples of innovation that are advancing contact centers.

Artificial intelligence

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, it is possible for contact centers to depend less on human agents. What artificial intelligence can do is analyze and extract valuable information from big amounts of data and make use of this information to predict trends, monitor customer behavior, and help the company make forecasts. When it comes to providing customer service, AI is an invaluable tool used in automating metric monitoring, call volume tracking, and staffing. AI can also help in predicting potential problems which can be addressed before they arise.

Chatbots

Yes, chatbots are ubiquitous, and companies love to incorporate them in websites and even use chatbots as a cost-effective alternative to human agents. Using chatbots also helps in eliminating errors and reducing the time spent on interactions. It is further predicted that in the next two years, more than half of companies will invest more in developing chat bots than mobile applications. With the help of machine learning, chatbots will also have the capability to determine when a customer is having trouble with a question so that a human agent can intercept and improve the experience.

Multi-channel technology

Customer support is more interactive now than before. Companies no longer wait for customers to reach them; instead by using multiple channels, they can engage with customers and cater more efficiently to their concerns. Customers today have a variety of preferences when it comes to getting customer support. In fact, traditional phone interactions are starting to take a back seat in favor of social media, apps, chat, and email.

Speech analytics via call recording

Recording phone calls is a standard procedure in contact centers. But in addition to using recorded calls to analyze and predict common customer concerns, speech analytics has also greatly helped in improving customer service skills. By fully maximizing the technology available, these recordings give managers more insight into the performance of agents; thus, identifying areas for improvement and to better anticipate the needs of customers by listening to specific voice cues which are only observable in captured phone conversations.



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