These changes combined have made call centre professionals have to restructure their centres, taking on new technologies in order to meet the new expectations set. Below we’ll take a look at some of the technologies which are shaping the future of call centres.
Softphones in call centres
Statistics show that employees like working from home. It lowers stress, raises productivity and ultimately improves job satisfaction. However, not all jobs are suitable for working at home, so it is important that the right technologies are implemented to try to make it as doable as possible.
Employees can’t take their work phones home with them, so in place of desk phones, you can implement softphones (software phone). Often built into CRM or UC systems, softphones bring all the functionalities of a telephone onto a computer or mobile device, and offer a way for agents to have telephone services to hand without the need for hardware.
Artificial Intelligence
Contact centres have already begun to be early adopters of Artificial Intelligence. AI is already used for performance monitoring and analytics, predicting customer needs and also for chatbots. Another interesting way AI will be used is for speech analytics – whereby, the AI can recognise the tone of the caller, then match the caller with an agent based on the agent’s personality and skill level.
Live Chat and Social Media
A study carried out by Call Center Helper found that 40 percent of managers want to implement live chat next, 22.5 percent want messaging apps, and 15 percent of call centre managers want social media to be the next technology they implement into their call centre.
All these features enable real-time communication, with live chat being used on the company website, messaging apps (such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger) happening over mobile, and social media interactions occurring on both mobile and desktop.
All these platforms enable customers to create interactions with companies on platforms that they already frequently use, making it easy for them to begin their enquiry as they are already familiar with how their platforms work. This ultimately has a positive effect on the customer experience if the resolution is handled effectively.
Unified Communications
Nowadays, customers want to have their own choice of how they interact with businesses. And when they do interact with a business, they don’t have to have to repeat themselves or explain their issue when it comes to a follow-up. For example, a customer calling in after sending an email wants to be able to pick up where the email left off, not start the query from the beginning.
This is where Unified Communications solutions come in. UC tools are online platforms designed to integrate telephony, email, social media, chat and more communication methods into one, allowing the agent to quickly see the correspondence between that of the business and the customers.
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