Cloud Contact Centres in 2025? What Does the Future Hold?

In the same way that cloud contact centres helped to disrupt the traditional, on-premise technology model, we expect the same thing to have happened by 2025 with communication-enabled platforms becoming the prevalent approach.

Already the first generation of cPaaS cloud-based communications platform-as-a-service solutions, including approaches such as Zang, are gaining momentum with the goal of revolutionising the way businesses can use communications to connect with their customers and employees.

The cPaaS approach allows organisations to create infinitely customisable communication experiences based on a next-generation, communication-enabled platform that sits upstream in the cloud to manage interactions. This allows customer contact professionals to supplement their existing environment via open and extensible API-based apps.

These smart apps will enable businesses to enable easy click-to-connect communications, with high quality video, chat, voice, SMS and document sharing from a range of mobile, web and desktop environments. They will also help service providers to craft more custom workflows in order to streamline customer journeys, collaborating where necessary with other communications apps such as Skype for Business or Google Hangouts, and also to track usage so that the service can be offered via a micropayments billing model.

While communication-enabled platforms will re-engineer the cloud model, more profound disruption will also come through the increased determination of major organisations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google to sit between businesses and their customers in order to orchestrate experiences. Whether it’s Amazon Echo, Apple’s Siri, Google Now or the Facebook M Assistant, customer contact specialists will need a highly agile underlying contact platform as well as customer journeys that evolve to take advantage of tomorrow’s more flexible Digital Front Door approaches. Customer contact platforms will also need to be flexible enough to support the transition to more ubiquitous speech-enabled AI, and be intelligent enough to deliver the kind of hyper-personal customer experiences that will become increasingly enabled through virtual reality. It’s going to be an exciting time!