teleworking agent

What will the contact centre of tomorrow look like?

While the trend towards teleworking While the trend towards teleworking was already underway in the customer relations sector, driven by homeshoring in particular, the health crisis that we have been experiencing since 2019 will have greatly accelerated this process in every industry. Tomorrow's contact centre could therefore integrate this cyclical accommodation into a new organisation in its own right! In parallel, increasing digitalisation is the second marker of a sector in constant evolution. Taken advantage of by both agents and customers, the home office continues to revolutionise the world of customer relations. To adapt to this growing trend, the implementation of robust customer relationship management tools is essential. Omnichannel, artificial intelligence, augmented agent... What will happen in the next few years? Companies will have to breaking established codes, while developing an omnichannel organisation, embracing the latest AI technologies designed to improve the customer journey... and above all,internal efficiency!

A generalization of telework with nuanced benefits...

First and foremost, of course, is the flexibility of this organisational mode. The agent remains operational from home: it ensures the continuity of customer relationship management services regardless of external factors. 

The only problem (and not the least) is that many companies where teleworking was almost non-existent have had to adapt overnight to this new trend. Left to their own devices, teleworkers no longer know who to contact or how to get clarification or help, and when to communicate. 

This naturally leads to delays and bottlenecks, which have a major impact on the strict daily objectives that they must meet in every detail. In addition, the isolation, lack of confidence due to the difficulty of accessing the advice of a supervisor and the isolation often felt are all obstacles to the efficiency of a remote customer relations centre. 

The result? A stress for the telephonists and increasing and growing irritability of increasingly impatient customers, furiously waiting for quick answers and efficient responses to their queries.

Increasing digitalisation to meet new needs

The role of digitalization in the contact centre of tomorrow cannot be ignored. It is profoundly transforming the customer relations landscape in several major ways:

  • Digital workplace tools, including the cloud, which (ideally) allow remote workers to have their entire working environment at home,
  • Typical virtual assistants conversational chatbots and voicebots are given an increased role, offering ever more fluidity and improving the customer experience.
  • Lastly, marketing practices are used to enhance the customer experience. One example is omnichannel, which offers consumers a unified pathway and allows them to become more autonomous. These practices have gone from the stage of being emerging to that of being unavoidable, while the health crisis has propelled e-commerce to the forefront of consumer habits.

The main interest is to be able to deploy in real time new secure tools compatible with teleworking, to better manage and guide the teams of teleworkers, to easily access performance data and thus significantly increase the quality of service offered to customers. Far from being a mere concept, such an approach is now within everyone's reach and should be developed on a large scale in the years to come!

Furthermore, in this lively evolution, theartificial intelligence continues to demonstrate its contribution on a daily basis. This contributes to optimising support through the automation of responses to customers.

The same is true of telephone advisors. Indeed, their role within contact centres is evolving and gaining in importance because they hold a real irreplaceable human added value. By entrusting recurrent and low value-added requests to conversational assistants, agents can devote themselves to the most elaborate exchanges. The augmented advisor thus focuses on requests requiring a fine and precise understanding and an emotional intelligence that AI can never offer.

And tomorrow, virtual reality could further disrupt the customer experience offered by brands, and profoundly transform customer relations...

With ViaFlow, prepare your customer relations for the challenges of tomorrow

ViaFlow is a platform allowing to treat natively all the channels of the customer relationship, as well synchronous (voice, live chat) as asynchronous (SMS, MMS, email, social networks, etc.) and this, within a single interface! Everything your teams need to work in the best conditions, on site or at home.

ViaFlow is indeed entirely accessible remotely in a totally secure manner, and with a small hardware footprint. The icing on the cake is the hybridization of artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence, in order to facilitate the agent's work and the customer's life.

Would you like our experts to help you with your customer relations needs? Don't wait any longer, contact us !

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