Businesses and their contact centers around the globe have been changing at a rapid pace, focused heavily on enhancing the digital experience for both their customers and the agents that serve them. Part of this change involves contact center teams adopting new methodologies and software tools into their operations to ensure a more positive customer journey. In 2020, the global contact center software market size was estimated at USD $20.5 billion and is expected to reach USD $23.6 billion in 2021 (according to Grand View Research’s 2021 Contact Center Software Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report). Moving into 2022, the biggest opportunities in the contact center industry are going to be driven by the presence of more multimodal contact centers and the accelerated migration to the cloud.
The investment in new cloud services and other contact center technology will be even more imperative as agents continue to work remotely, with many organizations planning to save on real estate costs rather than holding onto dedicated floor space. Metrigy Research reported that as of April 2021, 73.1% of 524 organizations surveyed decided to continue with work-from-home options for contact center agents and an estimated 46.6% of agents from those organizations will continue to work from home long-term. The ability to work from home with cloud-hosted contact centers means that agents can work and live anywhere that reliable internet is available.
#1: The Cloud Will Prevail
Almost everything is moving to the cloud because it is scalable and reduces traditional IT overhead. We’re seeing everything from CPaaS services to bespoke solutions taking advantage of the cloud’s utility and business model. It’s easier to sandbox new applications on the cloud, refine them and then test them at scale before rolling them out into production, adjusting resources as needs change.
Companies using public cloud resources for contact center operations will need to test early (before deployment) and monitor often (24x7) to ensure the best customer experience can be delivered by the cloud provider before services move into production and transition to reliable daily operations.
#2: Reducing Agent Stress Through Better Technology
Agent churn is a continuing challenge. Talking to sometimes frustrated customers day-after-day is taxing enough, but if the technology doesn’t consistently work for the agent, it only further impacts the customer experience and the longevity of the agent in role. Higher agent churn leads to higher expenses over time with recruitment, hiring and training all adding up each time a new person is needed to meet staffing requirements.
Automation is one key to reduce agent workloads, using technology like chatbots to smooth the path and solve problems that don’t require a human being. Another is making sure the agent’s technology works as expected, so the customer’s entire journey works well.
Digital self-service technologies and agent interactions alike require testing, troubleshooting and reporting in order to support the various modes of communication with bots and humans. It is especially important to test at the maximum anticipated scale of use, because that’s when unexpected things can sometimes go wrong, challenging key business metrics at moments when they are most in the spotlight.
Since residential Internet services are dynamic and sometimes unpredictable, effectively testing an agent’s remote network connection frequently and regularly is vital for avoiding a bad customer experiences at any time. With light-weight code installed at the end-point client or browser, it’s easy to test the health of the network and continually monitor it during the course of the agent’s workday, proactively reducing the mean time-to-repair if things go wrong.
#3: Automation, Automation, Automation (in the Contact Center)
Reducing hours and human-touch work is happening for many reasons, including increasing the speed of building and testing new applications and configurations. Recently, we’ve seen a growing number of contact center teams implement tools into their operations that are more traditionally used in software development. Based on Agile methodologies, these tools can automate tests, address quality assurance and focus on general documentation and collaboration across teams. One of the drivers for this shift in approach is certainly to optimize costs and spend less time working on the nuts and bolts of telephony operations but it is also related to a strong desire of many organizations to reallocate those expenses into efforts that differentiate their brand based on great customer interactions. Automated testing allows teams to focus on higher value efforts, such as incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence into the customer journey.
The second driver is the mainstream presence of multimodal contact centers where customers can use online chatbots, text messaging and other cloud-based communication systems in addition to the traditional phone call to communicate with agents. This kind of multichannel engagement will continue to play a critical role in creating high-value customer experiences that result in retaining and creating new revenue streams and improved customer satisfaction. It will be critical that the context of these online chats, texts or tweets are presented to agents for a seamless customer journey when necessary. In addition, the integration of multimodal scenarios will require a more disciplined DevOps approach, so contact centers will need to align their operations to the various ways that customers want to communicate with their brand moving forward, including integration with other applications and devices
Happy Contact Center, Happy Customer
The cloud, reducing agent stress through technology, and increased use of automation in building new contact center tools all increase the ability of contact centers to deliver the best possible and most efficient customer experience. Nectar’s four pillars of monitoring and alerting, troubleshooting, testing, and analytics provide the means for contact centers to build, test, monitor and, when necessary, diagnose the underlying critical network technologies for providing great customer experiences.
