With business planning in full swing, this time of year is often rife with predictions. But in the contact centre industry, looking backwards can often give us a clear indicator of what lies ahead. Few would argue that 2020 was a year many are keen to forget – bringing with it both personal and professional challenges no one could have predicted. However, the coronavirus crisis marked a clear turning point for the contact centre – one that has laid the foundations for further changes on the horizon.
Indeed, many of the tools, technologies and techniques that enabled the sector to navigate the pandemic – through lockdowns, infection scares and financial concerns – have put the contact centre on a course of continuing innovation and disruption for the decade ahead.
Let’s take a look at some of the emergent factors set to fuel the contact centre of the future.
Flexible Working Becomes the New Norm
Contact centres that had already adopted modern cloud technologies were able to pivot in a matter of days to successfully implement new distributed working models. Enabling agents to work securely and compliantly from home, even when handling payments, was just the start. Organisations also used their contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions to manage everything from workforce performance and wellbeing, to delivering support and training tailored exactly to the real-time needs of individual agents.
For many, the remote and hybrid models implemented in 2020 will determine how they resource contact centre operations in the future. This will usher in an era of more choice and flexible working options for agents, together with greater operational agility needed to cope with evolving market demands.
Working Smarter – with Greater Granular Control
Intelligent automation and smart scheduling tools certainly proved their worth last year as contact centres strived to optimise resource utilisation in the context of agent availability. Indeed, today’s AI powered Workforce Optimisation (WFO) proved highly effective at ensuring schedules were kept at peak efficiency, while giving agents maximum control over the hours they want to work.
Alongside automated services, intelligent routing, and real-time reporting, today’s CCaaS solutions made it possible to ensure agents were always presented with a familiar desktop – complete with the call recording facilities and integrated information databases they needed to perform – regardless of their location.
Some organisations even took advantage of their integrated CCaaS and unified communications environment to garner feedback from agents at the drop of a hat via virtual quality improvement ‘huddles’. Using these insights, contact centre leaders were able to tweak workflows to improve how agents interact with calls or the information systems they depend on to serve customers.
