Sabio identifies Top 5 Technology Trends for 2007

Leading contact centre specialist highlights the Agent Desktop, Intelligent Call Routing, accelerated Speech deployment, Virtualisation and Workforce Optimisation as key areas of technology focus for contact centres

Sabio, the innovative contact centre services and solutions company has highlighted the Top 5 Technology Trends that it believes will drive contact centre performance in 2007. According to Sabio’s Founding Director Adam Faulkner: “at a time when winning and retaining customers is more challenging than ever before, organisations need to make sure they’re doing everything they can to deliver the kind of customer experience that not only drives sales, but also builds relationships of lasting value.

“Keeping in touch with customers, recognising them when they contact you and letting them connect to you easily across multiple, integrated channels – is an essential component of any successful customer service strategy. For 2007 we believe that there are some key technology areas that can add real value for organisations, all of which are aligned around improving the customer experience,” he continued. “While organisations won’t necessarily address all these areas at once, we suspect that 2007’s most successful businesses will be those that build best practice customer contact strategies that leverage as many of these initiatives as is practicable.”

Sabio’s Top 5 Technology Trends for 2007 are aimed at optimising the three key requirements for any successful contact centre customer experience – initial recognition, routing to the most appropriate agent, and then ensuring that you have the available resources to address their call requirements. These trends collectively reflect the growing requirement for organisations to adopt the ‘customer-focused’ Service Personalisation approach they need to achieve major service transformations:

Detoxing the agent desktop
Intelligent Call Routing
Speech recognition
End-to-end workforce optimisation
Greater use of IP-enabled virtualisation

“While focusing on individual technology elements, it’s important for organisations to look at these people, process and technology issues as part of a single, end-to-end customer service chain,” added Adam Faulkner. “For the customer, getting all these elements right, in the right order and at the right time might seem simple, but at any given point even the simplest customer transaction could involve a wide range of different systems and applications including intelligent call routing, speech recognition, quality monitoring, call recording, dynamic skills-based routing and even the latest desktop integration technology. Our job at Sabio is to help guide organisations through this complexity.”

Sabio’s Top 5 Technology Trends for 2007

· Detoxing the agent desktop – streamlining the number of different IT applications that contact centre agents have to work with, creating a new generation of clean and intuitive desktops, will help agents to be more effective and leave them free to spend more time on their essential customer service tasks. Optimising the desktop is set to deliver a step-change increase in contact centre productivity and deliver superior customer service.

· Intelligent Call Routing – customers like to be recognised, and in 2007 we believe there will be a growing requirement for Service Personalisation approaches that can ID a customer quickly when they ring in, and then route that call intelligently to either an appropriately-skilled live agent or to a self-service application – whichever is best placed to resolve that customer’s requirements effectively.

· Continued increase in the adoption and deployment of speech technology – 2007 will see more and more organisations moving beyond initial speech trials to actually building speech solutions that support their core customer service processes. The successful speech applications will be those that automate the right tasks, understand that there has to be a benefit for the caller, and that is built around the needs of the caller rather than the organisation’s existing internal processes.

· End-to-end workforce optimisation (WFO) – while individual workforce optimisation components such as WFM and quality management are proving successful, we believe 2007 will be the year that sees an increased take-up of integrated WFO suites that combine WFM, e-learning, analytics, call recording and balanced scorecard reporting to help get the best out of contact centre staff. The WFO winners will be those organisations that take time to correctly set-up their suites to support their people and processes and unlock the optimum value from their WFO investment.

· Unlocking additional value through IP-enabled virtualisation – thanks to the spread of Voice enabled IP networks organisations are increasingly able to virtualise or pool their contact centre resources between multiple sites, allowing them to achieve better utilisation, reduce their overheads and improve overall business performance. By balancing the calls received between different sites and routing them to the centre that can answer calls quickest, businesses can manage their peaks and troughs and make full use of their available resources. 2007 will see this trend continuing, particularly in markets such as the public sector where the development of the shared services concept will help different authorities to establish themselves as best practice specialists in key business and technology areas.

10 Jan 2007

Filed under Call Centre News