Contact centres that think

Today's contact centres are intelligent enough to enable agents to recognise callers by name, and give them tools and techniques to facilitate more efficiency when answering and making calls. But the possibilities of an intelligent contact centre far surpass simple caller name identification and other practices that are commonplace today.

In the future, contact centres have the potential to give details on a caller's buying history, preferences, historical patterns, geography, culture, account status, interests, acceptance or declination of past offers, etc. Ultimately, using technology known as analytics, contact centres will even be able to detect a customer's mood, monitor an agent's tone and react to key words (eg, "bomb") for security purposes.

These "intelligent contact centres" of the future will be technology-driven. The Yankee Group defines intelligent contact centres as a single point of contact to provide quality customer care, while also acting as an individualised marketing channel to push new products and services. Agents' actions will be silently directed by technology, which will capture and analyse information and dynamically initiate specific actions based on that information.

This will have a significant impact for the businesses running contact centres. Firstly, agent error and dependence is decreased. Instead of relying on the need for a seasoned, well-trained agent, the technology drives the process, which means there is less reliance on the agent's skills and judgment. Agent training requirements are reduced, and the impact of agent turnover is eased.

Secondly, the customer's experience will be dramatically improved because he or she is presented with appropriate information and choices, unburdened by options that are often irrelevant. These factors will ultimately mean that contact centres will shift from being cost centres to profit centres in an organisation.

By implementing the right kind of technology now, contact centres are future-proofing their investment.

Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.

While the development of the intelligent contact centre is an evolution that will continue to mature over the next few years, many companies are already implementing systems that will enable them to benefit from the full possibilities of the future contact centre.

The primary interactions with today's contact centres are still via the telephone, but many contact centres are putting technology in place to handle different ways of communicating. In SA specifically, SMS is a popular medium of communication and many contact centres are also exploring video calls from mobile devices.

One of the primary factors driving the uptake of intelligent contact centres in SA is the need for workforce optimisation. Contact centre managers are embracing technology to enable them to make smarter use of their staff and tools to ensure they have the right amount of resources available to meet their needs. They are using technology to forecast and schedule resources to take into account holidays and quiet times of the year.

By implementing the right kind of technology now, contact centres are future-proofing their investment, and positioning themselves to take advantage of the full possibilities of intelligent contact centres.

According to the Yankee Group, although many companies are trying to transform their contact centre into an intelligent contact centre, it is practically impossible to achieve this without tight integration across all communications systems and enterprise applications. Tight integration between telephony applications, the infrastructure and enterprise applications can also translate into other benefits throughout the organisation.

A contact centre is a complex technology environment. For companies wanting to take advantage of the future benefits of intelligent contact centres, they need to work with a vendor that is able to deliver the least points of integration and development. Companies should consider vendors that are able to provide a comprehensive suite from one source that embraces new forms of media, but also gives them the integration to do workforce optimisation and workflow within the contact centre.

* Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.