Although the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to be left behind, its impact will remain in other areas, such as the workplace. One of the sectors that has been most affected is Customer Services, because all the operators have changed their way of interacting with the environment, and now everything points to 2023 as a year of consolidation for these changes.
Let’s remember that, as a result of the Coronavirus, users became more dependent on telematic channels to solve their problems. For their part, companies had to adapt to incorporate teleworking into their activities, while agents had to deal with more demanding situations and a heavier workload. These trends are still on the rise three years later.
THE VALUE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
If things work well in the company and its employees are happy, it is easier for the business to go ‘from strength to strength’. And even more so in companies where customer service is essential and each operator is an ‘ambassador’ of the brand.
GREATER OMNI-CHANNELING
In the wake of the pandemic, companies have also realized that being in a single channel is not enough to be able to interact and keep in touch with their customers. We live in an interconnected world where users want a wide range of alternatives for communication (telephone, e-mail, chat, social networks, video calls, etc.); therefore, in order to compete better, it is necessary to be available on all possible fronts.
CLOUD AS THE NEW WORKSPACE
According to the consulting firm Gartner, in 2021, 30% of cloud workloads were implemented on cloud-native platforms. By 2025 the prediction is that this percentage will grow to 95 %. The Reason? The scalability of this business model and the enormous possibilities that it can particularly offer to Call Centers and Contact Centers, such as greater Return on Investment (ROI) or easy roll out of the service.
INVESTMENT IN ANALYTICS TO IMPROVE KNOWLEDGE
The more information, the more opportunities to make good decisions. Companies want to know if they are doing well, to be able to assess the campaigns they are running and to understand their customers’ decisions. And, to achieve this, they are taking advantage of technological advances that allow them to obtain metrics (KPI’s) in real time or obtain useful results in the analysis from the feelings of their own employees and their customers.
SOPHISTICATION IN THE IVR
In 2020, call centers in Spain generated 0.8% more business than in the previous year, due to the direct consequences of the pandemic. Telematic customer service was the solution for many people who were unable to manage their incidents in face-to-face contact, and now they have become more used to still doing so.
To deal with this increased pressure, telemarketing companies can rely on sophisticated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) tools. Thanks to improvements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the bots that answer calls can do so much more humanely than before and offload work from agents.
ADDING SELF-SERVICE TOOLS
Sometimes, the problems that customers have are easily solved and do not even require the intervention of an agent. For these cases, companies are starting to look favorably on the use of self-service tools that guide users on the right path to solve their problems. In this way, calls become the last option for cases in which they have not achieved what they were looking for, which means queues with lower call volume and shorter waiting times.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR A PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCE
Investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in this sector is one of the best ways to lay a solid foundation for your business. This technology has a lot of applications and many of them are valuable for improving the customer experience, from personalized service to providing accurate responses in real time, and even predicting their behavior to anticipate problems before they happen.
As you can see, 2023 is shaping up to be an exciting year for contact centers. With so many opportunities, this sector has enormous potential, both human and technological, to still do so successfully in the short and long term.