The effects of the pandemic have greatly accelerated the pace of change in contact centres, and there is no going back to how things were. Deprived of the ability to visit physical stores and offices, customers turned to the contact centre and companies' websites to answer their queries.
The drive to unify these sources of knowledge and assistance is urgent and growing, becoming the digital contact centre, which can predict customer's requirements, be proactive in delivering the correct information and make relevant knowledge available to whichever employee or automated system needs it, when they need it.
The agent role in the digital contact centre has already expanded to handle complex matters but will also be needed to support the customer throughout their entire journey, from pre-sales advice, to onboarding, fulfilment, issue handling, customer recovery and post-sales support. These capabilities cannot come at the expense of letting costs run out of control: agents will be supported with AI virtual assistants on the desktop to advise the next best action, provide all relevant information and carry out customer sentiment analysis. Automated bots will help with handling repetitive tasks and delivering proactive outbound contact with customers to reduce unnecessary calls to the contact centre.
The agent community will not return en-masse to centralised working. The distributed model of hybrid office / home working will remain, with gig workers and other knowledge workers in the organisation added to the mix, supported by flexible, scalable cloud-based solutions.
The contact centre will act as a front door for a digitally-transformed business. It’s no longer just a place to respond to customer issues, but now has the power to build customer relationships that last, driving better business outcomes than ever before.
This White Paper considers three ways in which the digitally-transformed contact centre will improve organisations’ capabilities and outcomes through:
• Impacting the Entire Customer Journey
• Expanding the Agent Role
• Gaining Operational Improvements.