5 Powerful Contact Center Technologies for 2019

If I had to use two words to describe contact center tech in 2019, they would be:

• Cloud-based,
• Data-Driven.

I know – neither the Cloud nor a data-driven approach are new. The difference is that contact center vendors are now able to integrate technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics into their solutions, giving contact centers new ways of improving customer experience and of making it easier for the CSR to help the customer.

Both of these technologies require large amounts of data and work best in highly scalable, “on-demand” processing environments like the Cloud.

Let’s take a look at how 5 powerful technologies will impact the contact center in 2019.

Cloud Contact Center Solutions

Companies, regardless of size, location and industry, understand the need to offer compelling and differentiated customer experiences in order to compete in today’s world. To do so, companies need flexible, scalable and feature-rich solutions with intuitive interfaces and seamless integrations with existing systems.

The Cloud is providing these capabilities to the contact center where quick deployments, scalability and continuous feature and capability updates are needed to meet the evolving customer demands.

Intelligent Routing

The ability to connect the customer with the right person is more critical than ever to provide the best customer experience.

Cloud-based contact center solutions are now able to access the data and notes from your CRM and purchase history from your back-end billing system to intelligently route voice, chat, email and social channels and present this information in a unified view of the customer journey to omni-channel agents.

Speech Analysis

Speech Analysis gives organizations deep insight into how they actually interact with their customers. This insight can be used to improve the customer experience by enhancing agent performance and improve service delivery.

Real-time analytics allows for instant action while calls are in action, and included in recordings to provide historical value. Businesses can improve key business processes like quality monitoring, ensure regulatory compliance, or identify emerging trends in customer conversations.

Today’s call center technology is ‘learning’ how to recognize voice inflection and what that might mean in combination with the words being spoken by the caller.

What might it mean to your operation if, instead of having to wait for a CSR to escalate a call with an irate customer, your contact center software could alert the supervisor – in advance of a situation escalating – that a situation might be escalating, enabling the supervisor to intervene and assure the customer that his or her issue will be resolved.

Self-Service Applications

In today’s world, customers want the ability to service themselves first, and they value businesses that provide smart self-service tools.

Today’s advanced self-service functionality enables the business to create a customer self-service experience that’s omni-channel, personalized and conversational. These technologies empower your customers to help themselves with routine tasks, reducing the cost of service and driving higher customer satisfaction scores.

Artificial Intelligence

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to analytics.

Better communication (both ways) with people using natural-language processing, generation and contextual interpretation will make AI easier to use and will improve the use of all computing resources.

Deeper and broader integration with existing applications and IoT projects: AI has its greatest value when it is built into architectures that drive business and service value.

Tech is Changing the Contact Center

Advanced contact center technologies, like those mentioned above, are changing the contact center.

With contact center solutions providing voice, video, chat, text, email and social channel communication methods, the customer can control the way he interacts and much of that interaction doesn’t require CSR engagement.

And for those customers who do call and need to work with a CSR, the system can instantly access the multiple sources of customer intelligence your business might have in order to route the customer to the right CSR and ensure that the customer has the best experience possible.

If you’re looking for ways that your contact center can use advanced tech to both make your customers’ interactions easier and more pleasant and improve CSR productivity, our contact center experts can show you how to get there.  Contact us and set up a consultation to discuss how advanced contact center tech can improve your operations.

By Matt Pingatore, CEO of Packet Fusion