What are the 5 Top Contact Centre Trends of 2019?

The 5 Top Contact Centre Trends in 2019
Todd Carthothers, VP of Sales & Marketing from CounterPath

The contact centre landscape is becoming increasingly more digital. The use of innovative technology, such as Softphones and Unified Communications tools, has become commonplace as businesses are in the process of realigning the customer service experience.

It’s now become paramount that businesses deliver a seamless customer experience from start to finish for their demanding, digital-savvy consumers. Contact centres must also take measures to support remote call centre agents, who are a huge part of today’s contact centre workforce.

Additionally, businesses must recognise that consumer data is increasingly becoming an asset and utilising this can help them to boost their business. Let’s take a look into these current trends and insights, which can help to map out an omnichannel strategy.

1. Digital Transformation: meeting call centre needs of the future

How do you make customer interactions better? It’s vital for businesses today to deliver a seamless customer experience from start to finish for their demanding, digital-savvy consumers. Digital transformation can help redefine the contact centre service, improving communications – in short, opening up a world of new possibilities.

Contact centres on the cloud use the right channels to interact with customers, irrespective of location. For example, the smartest businesses (no matter what the size) are integrating advanced technologies across their workflows to provide full customer context within each interaction. They are also leveraging system data to provide proactive service which enables them to effectively resolve customer queries.

This highlights the importance of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) tools in supporting different workflows. Take for instance, team collaboration applications which have become strategically important for contact centres. One of the most important tools to influence the call centre environment, unified omnichannel communication tools help streamline business processes. They enable employees to collaborate better and empowers workforce mobility. Check out some other typical software requirements of modern call centre in this blog.

Also, there’s an increasing demand for customized UC solutions- applications with open APIs (Application Programming Interface) and Software development Kits (SDKs) can be leveraged to build an in-house solution that matches specific call centre needs and helps deliver a seamless customer experience. By adopting these emerging digital transformation strategies, contact centres can gain a competitive edge and battle market threats more effectively.

2. Rising adoption of cloud communications in call centres

Remote call centre agents are a huge part of the contact centre workforce today. A must-have alternative to traditional on-premise call centre, cloud communications have become integral for organizations looking to modernize their operations and add multiple communication channels to their workflows. This allows organizations to streamline team communications and build a collaborative culture. Cloud communications provide traditional office-based contact centres the flexibility to scale and expand to new locations by recruiting local talent without increasing overhead expenses.

As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Moving to the cloud isn’t a quick-fix solution that can happen all by once. By deploying a hybrid cloud solution, contact centres can gradually transition their operations into the cloud or even tailor the cloud architecture into a combination of multiple deployment models that fulfil their business needs. Instead of reinvesting in a complete overhaul, integrating a solution into your existing technology can be more cost-effective for your contact centre.

3. Empowering remote call centre agents with advanced UC tools

Decreasing overheads, time zone flexibility and mobile working are few of the factors that have encouraged the growing number of remote contact centre workers.

With unified cloud communications technology constantly evolving as per contact centre trends, remote workers have become a permanent (and beneficial) part of the contact centre environment. Collaboration tools facilitate contact centre agents to work remotely, enable them to stay mobile and give them access to real-time analytics and customer context on the go.

4. Enhanced contact centre analytics boosts performance

It’s 2019 and we are finally saying goodbye to that restrictive dependence on supervisor skills! It’s time we use the digital tools at our disposal to get the most out of our contact centre agents. Today, even SMBs are taking advantage of sophisticated analytics to convert data – like call and screen recordings, chats, SMS messages and more – into insightful feedback for their agents. In this information age, it’s impossible to rely on just manual observation and monitoring.

More omni-channel call centres are opting heavily for advanced analytics programs to build dashboards with statistics that affect their businesses. There’s an increasing trend of this kind of display of statistical dashboards on user interfaces, so that call agents and managers can get real-time updates on customer experiences.
With consumer data becoming an asset, we expect more advancements in analytics as companies continue to implement more unified communications platforms and strategies.

5. Changing the contact centre landscape with omni-channel communications

A must-have strategy for all contact centres gearing for the future of IoT, omni-channel platforms enable voice, video or chat communications via a single, universal solution that answers various call centre needs such as queuing, skills-based routing or facilitating customer care. Not only does it provide extensive workforce optimization, but it also enables agents to provide a more personalized experience to customers.

Businesses must factor in the multiple touchpoints of a customer journey – that it may commence with one channel of communication but end with customer’s feedback on a completely different one. Leverage the benefits of UC by integrating all your customer communications across channels. Provide a better agent communication experience with valuable context to customer care and resolve issues faster.

In order to provide the most seamless customer experience, our advice when evaluating your next call centre phone system, is to simplify the processes and make life easier for both yourself and customers. Go for a single, unified cloud offering, providing a complete set of real-time collaboration services. Not only will this help agents to become more flexible, but it’ll make them a lot more productive too.