3 Technology Trends to Watch Out For

Paul White reviews the tech trends that are most important for businesses to get right this year.

1. Omnichannel is here to stay

Contact centres can no longer provide customers with just one way to interact with agents. They want to have choice, and the ability to transition between channels depending on their enquiry. They expect the contact centre team to have full visibility of their journey in order to deal with their request effectively and efficiently.

The increasing demands of the customer makes an omnichannel strategy a must in 2016, meaning contact centres need to be focusing on providing a high-quality, consistent customer experience across all channels.

2. Customers will expect self-service

Marketing firm Gartner predicts that, by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their interactions with a business without dealing with a human. Self-service and automation technology are already becoming a key part of the omnichannel strategy for many organisations in 2016. This will enable a customer to start their journey via self-service but switch to another channel for assisted service if the enquiry becomes too complex.

Self-service solutions will allow customers to resolve the majority of their enquiries without needing to speak to an agent, while automation will allow contact centres to intelligently blend automated and assisted response for efficient processing of inbound customer enquiries.

3. Cloud contact centres will be the platform of choice

As a result of the rapidly changing technology trends and the need to implement cost-effective solutions, the cloud contact centre will become the number-one platform for many businesses. Reduction in overall cost is one of the main objectives of almost every business, but it is no longer the dominant driver.

While the transition from a large investment and upfront capital costs to a much more manageable opex cost model is definitely a key benefit of contact centres as a service (CCaaS), there are now more benefits driving CCaaS growth.

With a cloud platform, businesses are able to deploy the solution faster than a premises-based option and are given much more flexibility and scalability, allowing them to scale the licences to meet the changing demands of the call centre.

“Customer service has changed dramatically over the last decade and will continue to do so at a rapid pace. Customers now expect to be able to communicate with the contact centre via their channel of choice and receive a fast and accurate response every time. However, many contact centres are simply not equipped with the right technology to be able to successfully meet these demands. It is therefore important for them to review technology, processes and trends annually to ensure they are providing their customers with the best customer service possible,” said Paul White, CEO of mplsystems.

For more information about mplsystems, visit their website.