Winning businesses conquer markets with innovative service strategies and impeccable customer care. So making use of effective and modern call centres is a significant competitive advantage.
Currently, call centers have an array of possibilities to stay at the forefront of emerging technologies and that influences their market game.
In Q4 of 2014, we can talk about a number of trends that appeared just this year. Let’s look at what developments shook up (and continue to change) the call center world.
Mobile Customer Services
Whether it’s browsing, purchasing online or contacting the call center, it can all happen via a mobile device now. Smartphones and tablets have influenced and changed how customers communicate with businesses. Companies are moving their web applications to mobile platforms and what’s more: apps are responsive in-real time, allowing the customers better overview of their accounts.
The Cloud Migration
As older solutions have outlived their serviceability, the cloud allows call centers to perform on many more levels, such as chat, proactive customer contact, and enterprise response management to name a few. Cloud-based telephony has altered the the whole experience of customer care over the phone. Information storage is both more efficient and significantly cheaper, it can be managed from a distance and is quick to deploy. Access is faster than ever.
Social Media
More and more contact centers get in touch with their customers via social media platforms and that – because it is customers’ prefered touch point what concerns real-time response capacity.
Facebook and Twitter are beginning to serve as first contact and escalation channels, which decreases inbound calls. And of course, call centers can monitor the sentiment of their customers and provide the exact information when called to resolve the issue in question.
Call-Back Technology
Automatic call-backs are beginning to receive the deserved attention as a solution to one of the top three complains customers have: waiting on hold. In other words, the customer types their phone number and hangs up for the duration of the waiting period to connect with a customer services rep, he is then called just before the rep can take the call. This development is budget- and time-conservative and offers the best possible customer care.
Video Customer Support
You may be surprised to find out that global companies, such as Verizon and IKEA, have implemented video support into their customer services. This trend is clearly pointing at an increase in call center usage of video support to provide optimal customer services experience. And the concept does not imply actual persons behind a camera responding to query. You can think along the lines: animation potential. Videos can be used in customer service apps at the contact centre but from a distance too. For example, a help-desk agent can display a troubleshooting video or a how-to explanation.
2014 has been a year of subtle change that is picking up speed. Technology allows a new kind of customer care which in the end is the choice of our customers. We are not talking only about the way call center agents take calls or how call centres qualify achievement. It is the customer experience that catalyses the current developments and we ought to stay tuned. Knowing how that relationship will evolve is the prerogative of winning call centers.
