What are the Latest Technological Trends In Call Center Industry

The call center industry is growing at an exponential rate every year with new innovations and advancement in technology. New ways of customer handling are evolving with the application of artificial intelligence, virtual agents, cloud communication and social media engagement.

Every call center is focused toward providing high-level customer service to each and every customer even on the remote parts of the world. Growing technology has helped a lot in bridging the gap between the call centers and customers by adopting new and fascinating ways of providing good customer service.

So today we will try to understand the present scenario and the latest technological trends in the call center industry.

Application of Artificial Intelligence

Businesses nowadays are more focused on predictive analysis by the application of artificial intelligence in order to customize the call center experience for its agents and customers. As per a recent study, more than 85% of interactions between customers and the call centers will be handled by AI-powered machines without the need of any agents by 2020.

Implementation of business intelligence (BI) will enable the call centers to monitor and track customer behavior and identify the pattern or trends in sales. Whereas artificial intelligence (AI) will allow the companies to make suggestions, analyze and predict the business forecast of companies. Both artificial intelligence and business intelligence can be properly used to track and monitor campaigning cost, investments, call volume prediction, staffing requirements, and several other critical metrics even before any problematic situations arises.

Moreover, both artificial intelligence and business intelligence are capable enough to identify flags and suggest proper opportunities for upselling product or service based on individual customer interaction. However, the application of both AI and BI are in in the initial stages of the call center industry and are expected to be more comprehensive and intelligent in the coming years.

Omni-Channel Communication

The days are gone when customers used to contact businesses for their needs. Now the situation has been completely reversed and businesses are finding out new and innovative ways to interact and engage with the customers and keep them connected.

Omnichannel mainly signifies multichannel or different new ways of communication by which the call centers of a company can get connected with the customers and vice-versa. As per a recent Forrester report, more than 41% of US online adults would like to communicate digitally with the companies rather than talking with the agents of the contact center.

We all are extremely busy nowadays and hardly find any time to reach out to the companies via phone call and explain the situation to the contact center agents repeatedly and so the customers would like to move between different customer service channels for proper follow up. Thus in order to provide seamless and positive customer experience and increase customer loyalty call centers are investing heavily in omnichannel solutions so that the customers can reach out to them whenever they like on their preferred mode of communication.

Cloud Communications and Remote Service

Cloud communications and remote service is another important addition in the list of recent trends in the call center industry. There has been a steady increase in the number of remote support agents in call centers and cloud communication has become an indispensable part of businesses in order to do enable seamless and uninterrupted communications among the team members.

Moreover, with the increasing adoption of cloud communications, office-based traditional call centers can expand in new locations and the agents can even provide support by working from home from any part of the world. So practically speaking the day is not further when there will be no need of having an office-based traditional call center and the call center agents will now have access to all the tools at their home which are required to give support to the customers. Moreover, call centers will now have the freedom to hire the most qualified agents from any part of the world who will be able to work remotely and they will not have to stick with local agents at the time of hiring.

Growth of Intelligent IVR

IVR or Interactive Voice Response has been in use in the call center industry for several years. But now with the integration of artificial intelligence to it, the IVR systems have become more advanced and intelligent.

The highly sophisticated and advanced IVR systems are capable of diverting the callers to the desired outcome they are looking for and enable them to have a more personalized experience each time they get connected with the call center. With the application of AI in IVR, speech recognition will now play a more critical role in the system and it will be able to identify the tone and voice of the caller in a more accurate way. This will enable the AI-based system to filter and divert the callers to a specialized agent of a particular department for more customized support as per customer’s requirement.

The new intelligent IVR systems will not simply put the callers on the queue waiting to be attended by support agents but will gather relevant information and utilize specific conversations and divert them to the respective support specialist. Previous case histories of the customers will be analyzed and the call will be connected with agents who have dealt with similar queries or situations before in order to enable efficient customer management.

Increase in Number of Remote Call Center Agents

Flexible time zones, freedom to work from home, and lower cost of hiring will push the growth of call center agents who work remotely and it will be a prevailing trend in the years to come. With continuous improvement and unified cloud communications, remote workers will play a more significant and permanent role in the call center industry. Call center agents will be able to take their work mobile and with modern-day advanced collaboration tools, they will have access to customer information and real-time analytics.

" In this era of ever-changing modern technology call centers are going through a massive change and more new technological trends will come up in the coming years as the call centers become more advanced and sophisticated ".