The tradition of reflecting on a year gone by and attempting to extrapolate future expectations from present patterns is one that will never die, regardless of the black swan events the world has endured in recent years. Certainly, where the technology is confirmed, many of the shifts we have witnessed as ‘sudden innovations’ were already well signalled anyway, by those keeping an eye on such things - people like Gary Bennett from Enghouse, who is anticipating the following high-level themes may dominate in the year ahead.
Cloud Maturation
Cloud computing arguably saved the world of work during the forced distributed working throughout the pandemic, but the technology underpinning it has been around in some form for at least 20 years. Thanks to a convergence of bandwidth and hardware advances, many organisations were able to finally make the leap when pushed, with relative ease:
“In the last decade the momentum has built and built, but that journey accelerated and expedited because of Covid,” Bennett said. He regards this as a new phase of cloud computing, Cloud 3.0, where a truly cloud-native approach is both conceivable and desirable.
“It is now possible to do joined-up customer experience directly in the cloud, depending on what you’re selling and how regulated your industry is,” Bennett explained. But, it does require a rethinking, in some cases, of the integrated customer journey. “To make that happen, you need an optimised process, and you need optimised systems that are integrated really intuitively with each other so that the journey or the customer just follows a pathway that feels natural and intuitive”
Bots Have Come of Age Too
Automation in CX has meanwhile improved continuously, following a progress curve already well in hand. In the past, automated interactions with brands might have been an inferior experience for all but the most routine queries, with the preferred action to expedite to a human agent as quickly as possible - but things have changed so much, with the advance of natural language processing:
“The accuracy and sophistication mean that the application can process and understand not just words and phrases, but also context and sentiment, meaning that the bots can solve all kinds of queries.”
But Bennett doesn’t anticipate this change impacting headcount and demand in western/on-shored contact centres dealing with in-depth enquiries: “you still need those high-value humans to do the complex, awkward, ugly, you know, emotional stuff…. A bot is going to be more consistent and more accurate than a human would be. And probably happier than a human would be, doing the routine mundane stuff again and again and again.”
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Gary Bennett[/caption]