What will tomorrow's contact center look like?
Nov. 25, 2021
While the telecommuting trend was already taking its course, driven in particular by homeshoring, in the customer relations sector, the health crisis we've been experiencing since 2019 will have greatly accelerated this process in every industry. Tomorrow's contact center could therefore incorporate this cyclical accommodation into a new organization in its own right! At the same time, increasing digitalization is the second marker of a constantly evolving sector. Used by agents and customers alike, the home office continues to revolutionize 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 agents... What will the future hold? Companies will have to break established codes, while developing an omnichannel organization, embedding the latest AI technologies designed to improve the customer journey... and above all,internal efficiency!
The benefits of widespread teleworking...
First and foremost, of course, is the flexibility of this organizational mode. The agent remains operational from home: this ensures continuity of customer relationship management services, whatever the external factors.
The only hitch (and not the least) is that many companies where telecommuting was virtually non-existent have had to adapt overnight to this new trend. Left to their own devices, telecommunicators no longer know who to talk to, how to get clarification or help, or when to communicate.
Naturally, this leads to delays and bottlenecks, which have a major impact on the strict daily objectives that operators have to meet down to the last detail. What's more, isolation, a 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 center.
The result? A high level of stress for call center agents, and growing irritability among increasingly impatient customers, furiously awaiting fast, efficient answers to their queries.
Increasing digitalization to meet new needs
The role of digitalization in tomorrow's contact center cannot be ignored. It is profoundly transforming the customer relations landscape, in several major respects:
Digital workplace tools, and in particular the cloud, which (ideally) enable remote workers to access their entire working environment at home,
Virtual assistants such as conversational chatbots and voicebots play an increasingly important role, offering ever greater fluidity and constantly improving the customer experience.
Last but not least, marketing practices are put at the service of the customer experience. Take omnichannel marketing, for example, which offers consumers a unified shopping experience and greater autonomy. These practices have gone from being just emerging to becoming essential, at a time when the health crisis has propelled e-commerce to the forefront of consumer habits.
The key benefit is to be able to deploy new, secure, telecommuting-compatible tools in real time, to better manage and guide teams of teleconsultants, 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 is set to expand on a large scale in the years to come!
In this fast-moving field,artificial intelligence continues to demonstrate its contribution on a daily basis. Artificial intelligence helps to optimize customer support through automated responses.
The same goes for telephone advisors. Indeed, their role within contact centers is evolving and gaining in importance, as they hold a genuine and irreplaceable human added value. By entrusting recurring, 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, precise understanding and emotional intelligence that AI can never offer.
And tomorrow, virtual reality could further revolutionize the customer experience offered by brands, and profoundly transform customer relations...
With ViaFlow, prepare your customer relations for tomorrow's challenges
ViaFlow is a platform for natively handling all customer relations channels, both synchronous (voice, live chat) and asynchronous (SMS, MMS, email, social networks, etc.), all within a single interface! Everything your teams need to work in the best possible conditions, whether on-site or telecommuting.
ViaFlow is fully accessible remotely, totally secure and with a small hardware footprint. The icing on the cake is the hybridization of artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence, to facilitate the agent's work and the customer's life.
Would you like our experts to help you with your customer relations needs? Contact us now!
