The Next 18 Months- Three Must-Have Call Center and Customer Experience Technologies Expivia is All In On

As a full disclaimer, my name is Tom Laird and I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group. Expivia is a 100% USA High End BPO contact center located in Erie PA. I am an honored member of the Incontact ICVC (Incontact Visionary Council) which meets with Incontact senior management to talk about the future of the customer experience, new products and suggestions for new products that Incontact and NICE are using to reshape the contact center and customers experience landscape. I am not plugging any specific products from Incontact. This is solely my opinion and my opinion only of where the Customer Experience is going based on my experiences in the industry and what I see coming.

So many things are happening in the customer service and customer experience space. Everyone has a plan for what the future will look like and customer service professionals are constantly struggling with what technology and techniques need to be adapted to meet ever-changing customer demands. These are the three technologies and concepts that my contact center bet on. We are or will be implementing these technology pieces in the next 60 days. This is me putting my money where my cursor is!
These concepts were formed based on what my clients would like to see and thought talking to the likes of InContact CEO Paul Jarman, Chief Strategy Officer Rajeev Shirivastava, and VP of Product Scott McDonald at the last ICVC meeting head earlier this month. Through all this, I was able to conceptualize where I believe the industry is heading and more importantly where we need to be.

1) Omnichannel communications- I know I know if you are like me we have all heard the phrases multi-channel and omnichannel repeated over and over in the CRM space for the past five years right! Well until now I didn’t think a full omnichannel solution was out there, I believe this has been a relatively new development contrary to what so many say. The industry has really looked at this and has finally come up with some great solutions. Technology is now out there to be able to handle all service channels under one platform. Why is this important?… It’s a seamless customer experience for the companies that adopt omnichannel.

Customers can now be on a chat session with an agent, requests an email, then a phone call, then go back to the chat session without stopping one channel and starting the other. All the data from the interactions is also stored so that agents in the future will be able to see all the interactions that a customer has had with your company. To have a full customer history on one platform from both operations and data perspective is relatively new to the industry. Multi-channel is NOT omnichannel and the customer experience shows that.

To be able to understand a customer because you see they ordered something from your company 3 days ago and you can see a pattern of this customer checking on arrival dates is powerful. You know the reason for the call before the customer tells you. The agent engagement is high when they know why a customer is calling and can use that information. This saves a ton of time and enhances the customer experience. Customers want you to understand them and want to be able to use any channel they prefer to talk to you. Now that can really be done well.

2) Speech Analytics- This new technology is a game-changer for all contact center managers and marketing professionals. This really is Big Data meeting the call center…finally. There is so much information on customer’s voice, chat, and email interactions that we never have been able to use until now.

Speech Analytics is changing the way contact centers operate. Real-time VOC data from what customers actually said allows an insight into customers that we have never had before. Want to know what your customers are saying about your product or service…then check out the keywords that are trending on your interactions. Are the word or phrases “too expensive”, “the low quality, or “waited too long” being said by many customers….now you will instantly know and be able to quickly pivot.

Quality Assurance is now able to see agents and customer sentiment when looking at calls. You can now tag calls where customers raised their voice, agents raised their voice, or when a customer started negative and ended positively due to a great agent experience. You can instantly tag calls where agents did not read disclosures or rebuttal to be able to pinpoint specific situations to enhance your training.

We can now pinpoint what customers are saying and what type of service we are giving with all the advancements in speech analytics. Amazing technology and if you are not leveraging it you are already behind.

3) Chatbots/Texting AI and Robots- Self-service in my opinion is being turned on its head with all the advancement of Chatbots and AI to the customer experience. Customers are using mobile devices to communicate. We are all constantly texting, yet the industry has been slow to truly meet the demands of these customers until now. On the basic end, chatbots are the new IVR. They can do anything an IVR can do but through a mobile texting medium. Want to switch your bill date, make a payment, change your password or check your balance…all you have to do now is chat with an organization’s “bot” that can do all that for you saving time and call center cost while allowing a great customer experience. Customers still have the option to text with a human or click to call into a call center but this self-service model is continuing to evolve with amazing results.

True texting AI is here as well and is improving all the time. The ability to have an open-ended chat with a chatbot to fix a problem is a reality. Text a concern and get a fix with no human interaction. That option is here. You will be seeing more and more companies moving to this channel in the next 18 months.

Robots are also moving to call center back office support teams. Repetitive tasks that agents do not want to handle can be done quicker and more efficiently by desktop robots. Super technology especially for companies that are using associates to enter the same information daily to form or interfaces. Revolutionizing back-office tasks.

So, these are the three technologies that we are Expivia will be shaping the customer experience and contact center landscape over the next 18 month. We have heavily invested in all three in R&D and in implementation.

We are using these technologies with our customers today that have their service or sales outsourced to us. If you have any questions or would like more information on our 100% USA Contact Center please fill out the Contact US form on our website at www.expiviausa.com

For more information please visit our home page at www.expiviausa.com