What will the contact centre of 2020 look like?
2020 may seem a long way off, but many of the factors and trends that will define the ‘contact centre’ of ten years’ time are already in place and starting to shape the future customer service agenda.
We’re already seeing an increased use of self-service technologies as organisations work to manage the demand flowing into their contact centres. By 2020 this process will have moved forward significantly, indeed we will probably no longer use the term ‘contact centres’, instead referring to ‘web centres’ as that will be by far the largest interaction channel.
The concept of the traditional, high volume voice-based contact centre will also be outmoded, as those type of interactions will all be handled by automated customer solutions.
There will still be a requirement for ‘agent’ interactions, however – following the ‘death of the phone number’ - these will typically be initiated from the customer’s web device. With embedded voice search and IP telephony technology, all a user will need to do is say the name of the organisation they want to get in touch with, and that will instigate the interaction. The type of account you hold, or the value of your business will determine the speed and quality of the response.
Because it’s a web interaction, ‘agents’ will have access to all the content you’ve been viewing, and will be able to enhance the richness of the interaction by providing customers with additional video content, latest pricing offers, and the ability and permission to complete transactions immediately where financial details are available. Interactions with agents will typically be complex, high value or the result of an escalation from an earlier web session.
Because the 21CN will be the default network, businesses will rely on SIP and presence technology to identify available service resources and expertise throughout an organisation. As a result the boundaries of the web centre will have become very blurred, with intelligent routing and resourcing making the structure of the traditional contact centre obsolete. Instead of having a thousand trained agents in an out-of-town centre fielding a range of enquiries from customers, organisations will instead rely on a lesser number of trained specialists who will operate from anywhere within an organisation, and will combine to provide customers with the quality responses they will still demand.
So the contact centres of 2020 won’t be called contact centres, they will be much smaller, much more distributed, and will handle a significantly smaller volume of interactions. However, while the model will have changed irrevocably, customer demand for a rapid, high quality personalised service won’t change at all. We’ll all just be handling things differently.