By Chalapathi Rao, Chief Executive Officer, Orange Business India
When travel boarders started reopening post-pandemic, the burgeoning travel itch among many led to an influx in travel demands whether by air or sea. In the case of a private cruise ship, the company had to replace its online premise booking solution that became a legacy system overnight when it could no longer cope with a sudden increase in travel bookings.
By migrating to a single cloud platform and scaling to needs, it not only managed to smoothen the seasonal demand spikes for customers and travel agents to book tickets with ease, but further enhanced contact centre capabilities and productivity for its 500 agents spread across 12 sites. Through the solution deployment, it improved service by providing high availability, advanced voice quality, omnichannel tools, and robust service level agreements to maintain an optimum level of customer service regardless of communications channel. The company also created a single point of contact and escalation path for service management and change control.
When it comes to the modernization of contact centres, similar success stories can be found in other industries. A manufacturer who has nearly 50 production facilities globally wanted to digitize its customer service and regain control from outsourcers while accelerating time-to-value, switched it up with solutions that now support its 8 contact centres operating in 35 countries and 25 languages, benefiting from customised scripts.
For contact centres and customer service agents, the introduction of technological solutions including omnichannel engagement, data and speech analytics, and Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbots are paving the way for an all-new customer experience that is instant, personalised, and cognitive. The contact centre market is none more pivotal than to India, a leader in the contact centre industry and a global outsourcing hub for contact centres with an estimated workforce of between 1.1 and 1.3 million employees serving a multitude of sectors locally and globally.
Setting the Bar
So, what really makes customer service the new battleground for today’s contact centers? The reason lies in the very fact that businesses are looking very much to stay competitive or be ahead of the pack based on the quality of experience they provide to their customers, i.e.: customer experience. A Gartner report predicts that 89% of all brands will primarily compete on customer experience, while Forrester has gone so far as to declare that customer experience is the only sustainable competitive advantage remaining in today’s marketplace. In a nutshell, a business that creates an experience that increases satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy will be able to drive better business outcomes.
Across contact centers, customers want to interact with customer support executives who empathise with them; however, customers do not mind interacting with bots if doing so helps in a faster service delivery. Additionally, customers today are savvy enough to use their preferred contact channel when they interact with businesses, be it social media, messaging, apps, chats, or voice. While customers today seem to demand a lot more, businesses need to be prepared for the customer landscape of tomorrow where they’ll want even more and expect using technology that has not been invented yet.
This calls for the need to transform customer experience to cater to the increasing demands for instant and personalised service. While this trend was already prevalent, the pandemic accelerated it as many organisations did away entirely with face-to-face service. Therefore, organisations must be able to implement contact center technology seamlessly, end to end, while adopting new technologies and services as needed, or as created. The ability to scale when needed in response to unexpected events is also key to the transformation of contact centers.
Besides personalising conversations based on customer context and data, as well as predicting customers’ next steps, the right solutions can ensure that agents too, have their needs met with remote working models for better work-life balance and self-managed availability, as well as leveraging the use of innovative features like video and unified communications tools.
Contact Centers Redefined: Trends and Innovations
From omnichannel engagement to AI-powered chatbots, these are innovations that have come to define the upward trajectory with customer contact centers. The omnichannel presence for any organisation would refer to omnichannel multi-cloud customer engagement solution that can be deployed on top of its existing IT infrastructure, in a seamless transition process that doesn’t disrupt business processes or services.
This allows for multi-faceted interaction with customers via voice, chat, social networks, instant messages, and emails from a single platform. The contact center employees can see a complete overview of customer requests in real-time, which would allow them to provide the right support quickly and efficiently. Coupled with speech analytics, the organisation can identify the reason for a customer’s call and provide a more personalised service through the customer journey, enabled by valuable data insights that not only optimise internal processes but also enhance self-service provision for end users.
Moving onto AI, it is known for its pivotal role as a co-pilot to a human customer support agent. Where customers in the past used to wait for as long as 30 minutes before receiving their chat replies, today’s era that have ushered in AI-powered chatbots can efficiently answer routine queries in A matter of seconds. Since the introduction of large language models, chatbots have become powerful enough to answer more sophisticated and demanding queries, and even schedule visits by technicians to customers’ homes with some backend support.
The prowess of AI too has opened up ways of understanding customers’ needs. For instance, AI’s sentiment analysis when embedded across an organisation’s touch points, can alert contact centre customer agents beforehand concerning a caller’s emotional state ahead of answering the incoming call. Having such insights beforehand, helps agents serve customers better and leads to a superior experience for customers.
It’s Human + Technology, not Human vs Technology
The integration of tools and solutions has proven to complement contact centers customer agents’ roles to becoming more agile, and amplifying their capabilities so they can better serve business needs and market demands. Transformation is an ongoing journey, however, it is by taking the first step of harnessing leading technologies with the best of human minds and knowledge that can continuously shape the future of contact centers’ customer support with efficiency, availability, accessibility, and personalised service.
