What Will Happen to the Contact Centre in 2016 and Beyond?

Our readers take a look at the changes set to shake up the industry in 2016 and beyond.

Leaders will need to adapt to managing a multi-generational workforce

For the first time ever, we have 5 generations in the workforce.

As people increasingly choose to work longer, the industry will benefit from retaining expertise in the workforce. However, having a broader generational range at work will also result in groups fragmenting in terms of age, technical ability and attitude.

Contact centre leaders of the future will need to focus on bringing these different generations together. Key skills will include promoting knowledge sharing and managing attitude change.

Agents will be untethered as contact centres are redesigned

Office space will be redesigned as contact centres begin to embrace the flexibility enabled by the cloud. From homeworking to the introduction of standing desks, contact centre agents will be untethered from their cubicles.

We will also see the emergence of activity-based office space, where agents will be able to move between different work spaces depending on the needs of their activity.

For example, sitting in a soundproof booth in the morning to handle video chat, before moving to an armchair in a communal workspace in the afternoon to handle webchat.

With thanks to Nicola Millard, Customer Experience Futurologist at BT Global Services

Agents will benefit from intuitive interfaces and smart pop-ups

There will be an increased focus on intuitive, easy and fast systems, removing the need for agents to learn how to manage multiple, complex systems.

Smart pop-ups will also become the norm, including all the information an agent needs to resolve a customer query. In the event that an agent requires assistance, new tools will enable an individual to collaborate with their colleagues and receive an answer from the “resident expert” during a live call.

Supervisors will be able to work effectively from a remote location

The cloud will untether supervisors from their workstations.

They will have the freedom to manage their team from a remote location, while accessing bites of valuable data about their agents’ individual strengths and challenges – rather than having to skim pages of reports for useful insights. They will have the tools to be able to change the interaction flow based on circumstances too.

Management teams will also be able to access and analyse big data, which will enable them to personalise the customer experience.

With thanks to Mike Murphy at Interactive Intelligence

Customer demand will prevent contact centres from fully adopting Artificial Intelligence

Brands will try to go fully AI in the way they tried to offshore.

However, I suspect the public, who call because they want to talk to a human, will pull the trend back so that there is a measure of both options in the industry.

With thanks to Nerys

Agents will be recruited for their soft skills rather than their technical ability

Improvements to knowledge management and agent desktops will reduce the need to recruit tech-savvy agents.

Instead, we’ll focus in on soft skills such as empathy and conflict management.

Certain environments are already starting to do this with human-backed virtual agents.

With thanks to Craig

We’ll show our customers more respect

We’ll start using less aggressive outbound dialler strategies and show more respect to potential and existing customers.

With thanks to Glendon

Customers will still want human-to-human contact

Self-care options such as apps, online and IVR systems will be capable of handling the more transactional queries.

However, nothing will ever take away the customer’s need to speak with an agent, as humans can pick up on things no computer or system can.

With thanks to Craig

Only complaints will be escalated to a human

Very soon Artificial Intelligence will take care of everything.

Only complaints will be escalated to a human, much like they’re escalated to a supervisor now.

With thanks to Pete

Text-based channels will become more prevalent in 2016

Text-based channels such as webchat and social media will become more prevalent in 2016 and beyond.

With thanks to Paul

More and more contact centres will introduce webchat

We’ll see an increase in overall head count and the introduction of webchat and social media.

With thanks to Dean

Social media will become the norm

Social media and mobile engagement will become the norm.

With thanks to Jonas

The cloud will enable more collaborative working spaces

2016 will bring much better collaborative working – with access to cloud services being more and more commonplace.

With thanks to Dean

Customers will demand instant messaging apps

Customer preference will drive the uptake of webchat, Twitter and instant messaging apps.

This won’t only be for customer support, but also for sales and bookings – with higher demand for cross-platform contact management software.

With thanks to Petteri

Machines will eventually be better than humans at handling complex queries

Today, call centre agents still handle the more complex problems, while technology is increasingly handling simple, repetitive tasks.

5 years from now, however, machines will be better at handling the complex problems than humans.

With thanks to Craig

Artificial Intelligence will take over completely once the robots pass the Turing Test

Once robotic agents pass the Turing Test, it will be Artificial Intelligence all the way!

With thanks to Petteri

Script-based conversations will be automated in the near future

Agent–customer conversations which focus heavily on the use of a script are most likely to be automated in the near future.

With thanks to Cindy

Smartening the experience

The use of knowledge management, the process of gathering, analysing, storing and sharing information, is set to rise. Suggested answers and search intelligence will be fed to both agents and customers depending on the channel, to help them find the information quickly, enhancing the customer experience. Alongside this, new technologies that can read natural, conversational language will lead to high accuracy inquiry hits, meaning customers avoid having to ask specific questions or spending unnecessary time searching. Advanced natural language interactive voice response (IVR) is now coming of age, making the recognition of required information more efficient and more easily identifiable. Eliminating numbered choices in IVR also makes getting to the root of an issue much quicker – the stage of pressing a selection of numbers through long menus in order to talk to the right person is being removed.

Converging applications

In the past, there has been a separation between the CRM and the call centre platform world – this is about to change significantly, with a number of the players beginning to blur between the two worlds. This is because the customer details are in one application (the CRM) which is often the key. Integration is going to get tighter and may even end up as one application at some point.

2016 will welcome a host of new technologies and capabilities, but one theme that runs through all of the above and other factors, which hasn’t been covered, is the introduction of a number of interactions being managed without the physical human. We are just at the early stages of these industry developments, but it’s where the market is heading.

With thanks to Stephen Wright, Product Manager for Unified Communications and Contact Centres, Azzurri Communications

Interaction with the customer via video

Video will be a key technology for contact centres in 2016, as agents increasingly interact with customers via video to deliver a more engaging and higher quality service, as well as a more personalised experience.

Education and training

Education and training will be at the forefront of the contact centre industry in 2016 as businesses become less siloed. For example, contact centre agents in banks traditionally played a completely different role from employees in-branch, but today they speak with clients much more frequently, a shift which represents an enormous sales opportunity as long as agents have the right training and resources to hand.

With thanks to Richard Kenny, Head of Global Contact Centre Marketing at Plantronics

How do you think the contact centre industry will change in 2016 and beyond?