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Collaborative Customer Service

Enhancing the customer experience should be a core focus for call centres, but in doing this they will need to embrace different forms of media collaboratively. One such technology and concept that is currently greatly under-used is the Universal Queue - whereby multiple communication channels are integrated into a single queue to standardise processing and handling. This allows agents to collaborate centrally to resolve customer queries more effectively.

The technology has been available for years and systems were purchased with the capability to ensure they were future proof, but there were not many companies ready for this change in approach. We are now seeing companies, however, making more use of this technology as the divide between the call centre and online interaction narrows. Longer term, we expect to see companies using the concept of the Universal Queue in a proactive way to improve the service expectation of their customers.

Data Analytics

Data Analytics or performance information increasingly provides opportunities for improved business decisions.

Enhancements to speech recognition technologies are now allowing companies to add further information such as emotional content and triggers into their analysis. We expect Data Analytics to grow over the next 18 months as companies strive to improve customer satisfaction.

Unified Communication (UC)

Call centres have been moving away from Best of Breed solutions across to Unified solutions. Call centres are adopting UC, allowing users to personalise, control and manage calls, messages, directories and information from any location, which is a valuable tool for any organisation. However, we believe that, increasingly, call centres will put presence at the heart of UC. We don't just mean automating the contacts book through the desk top to the call centre, but actually seeing precisely which agents, devices and objects are linked to the network, i.e. what documents are open and by whom.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

SIP saw further progression in 2009. In 2010 we are seeing new services and options increasing, with rapid growth towards the end of the year. In particular, we anticipate that SIP trunking will be the biggest area of growth. Call centres will use it to reduce the cost of connectivity to service providers, thereby enabling better use of telephony resources.

Text to Speech

With the incorporation of Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology that converts normal language text into speech, it is possible to improve the automated service to a customer without the use of an agent. Call centres are using it to play personalised messages to customers for both incoming and outgoing calls by looking up information from the companies CRM and incorporating that into the message.

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