Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in service requests via phone. According to the Call Center Association, up to 25 million customer calls are made every day in German contact centers alone. During digital transformation, not only the range of products and services is changing, but also the way they are used. The resulting increase of calls in contact centers makes a scalable solution necessary. Especially in urgent and sensitive issues users prefer the telephone as their first support channel. At the same time, the contact center is changing the way of how they present themselves in front of customers. Today's goal is not only to be able to solve customer’s concerns quickly and cost efficiently, but also with a positive customer experience.
Future orientation through cloud and artificial intelligence
Especially in Germany, cloud solutions were still considered as a problematic topic because of the high requirements for compliance, security, and data protection guidelines. However, with the pandemic the need for contact centers to offer quickly and flexibly home office options for their employees rised. Artificial intelligence (AI) is used within cloud solutions. In the contact center, speech recognition and text analysis offer good starting points for adaptive algorithms. Due to the constantly growing amount of data, AI-supported systems are becoming more and more relevant and necessary. Not only because of AI can identify critical patterns and support the actions of agents. It helps to navigate quickly and determined through the great amounts of data, to shorten work processes and ultimately to act faster when it is necessary. In addition, new models can be developed in which AI enhances human capabilities and enables a new and sometimes better way of working.
The obvious benefits are:
- Work processes are shortened through language processing and statistical correlations
- Fast and targeted analysis using Natural Language Processing
- Structuring of data automatically
- Improvement of customer relationships through evaluation of collected customer feedback
Compliance in the Contact Center
Almost all contact centers worldwide and across industries must comply with a range of regulatory requirements. From GDPR, MiFID II to PCI-DSS, legislation is impacting contact centers. As soon as data is recorded for quality purposes, storage, encryption and archiving these data must be processed in a legally compliant manner. The recording channel also plays a major role. Whether recording voice, video or text – same standards were applied for every channel. Recording solutions must provide the ability to capture, store, recall and analyze recordings after the required retention period.
Cloud-based contact centers enable organizations to meet all these requirements. Whether they have multiple locations or home office employees, a cloud solution allows contact centers to reduce their overhead costs while increasing their scalability by multiple times by eliminating the need for physical infrastructure.
Customer Experience: The Future of Contact Centers
The financial and tourism industries were facing an immense increase in call volumes during 2020. Nevertheless, it was the top priority in the service sector to solve problems quickly and to deal with customer concerns courteously. With professional recording solutions, contact centers can take advantages of comprehensive insights gained from interactions with their customers. This creates a bigger picture of customer satisfaction, customer journey, and how agents are performing when dealing with callers.
Artificial intelligence will be increasingly integrated into contact centers in the future, but it will not replace the performance of employees completely.
Find out more about current trends and challenges as well as tools for optimization the customer service, including study results, in our handbook "Recording, Quality Management and Analytics for the Optimal Customer Experience in the Contact Center".