Times are changing, and so is the digital contact centre. Even prior to COVID, the past few years have seen an increased focus on customer experience and a large increase in customers' expectation to engage with the contact centre through the channels of their choice.
With over 20 years of experience in the business, Perry Price, Founder and CEO of Revation Systems, has seen the contact centre through most of its major changes.
"It's now more critical than ever to make sure that your contact centre is armed to let the customer communicate with you based on the technologies that they want to use. And it's no less important to make sure that your contact centre is handling that information securely" says Price.
"Text is a great example of that in the regulated vertical markets that we serve. As consumers, we all love to text. It's our first mode of operation. We'd love to just text our bank, but so much text today is unencrypted," Price explains. "Banks, hospitals, large insurance companies – they don't want to allow freeform human-based texting. So we're doing some things in healthcare that allow that text engagement to occur, but automatically transition it to help automate the front end of the workflow."
Simply put, this means that if a patient wants to, say, schedule an appointment at a clinic, they can do it over text messages.
"This technology allows letting the user engage a little bit on text with a bot, to drive that human engagement over a more secure channel, whether it be face to face, email or video."
Consumer-Centric Video
The contact centre market is gradually changing its approach not only to text, but to video as well.
"One of the things that we've been focused on for a while is bringing video engagement to a regular contact centre transaction," says Price.
“However, when COVID hit, we started getting a lot of calls from medical organisations that did not have telemedicine implemented. We quickly decided we could put something together in 90 days that could provide an easy to use, secure video telehealth capability that didn’t require an application, download or password.”
This might sound like a major undertaking, but Revation Systems pulled it off.
"In this post-COVID arena, we're all using tools that are originally meant to conduct business- to-business communication transactions. So instead of coming from a B2B approach, we developed a service called CmyDoctor, which has a consumer-centric video engagement capability."
This attempt to fill in a gap in the market turned out to be successful.