The Morphing Contact Center

By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner

Recently, we’ve been exploring the future of contact centers. One macro trend we see is that more and more enterprises view customer service as a key differentiator. They’re shifting strategic focus to the overall customer experience. Subsequently, contact centers are increasingly being used for marketing and revenue generation, as opposed to ‘just’ dealing with customer complaints and problems.

Helping to accelerate this trend is the impact of technology. Enhancements in self-service, like virtual assistants, are automating basic interactions, leaving more complex interactions with agents. Artificial intelligence is being used more and more in the contact center, providing agents with easy access to information, and providing the business with insights on what types of interactions are occurring.

We’re fascinated and impressed by how artificial intelligence can and will impact the contact center. Moving forward, there will be more automation and less agents but with a higher skill level. Ultimately, in the far off future, you may longer need a contact center as it exists today. Human agents will be replaced by virtual beings that can handle any interaction on any channel at any time of the day. You’ll have the ultimate in customer service, providing instant resolution for any customer request.

Now before we declare the death of the contact center, the technology to achieve this ultimate vision isn’t available today and probably won’t be available for a long, long time. Leading vendors have a strategy of using artificial intelligence to automate the easiest functions in the call center, eliminating the need for human interaction. Then they’re going up the stack dealing with more complex functions, regulating human agents to the most complex functions.

Already, leading contact center vendors are using artificial intelligence for:

• Smart IVR — Human-like, voice-enabled conversational interfaces personalized based on the caller profile for faster resolution times and greater satisfaction which are data-driven for real-time adjustment and optimization.
• Predictive Call Routing — Automatically captures interaction data and routes users to the correct agent based on their customer profile (intent, context, history, sentiment, etc.) and the agent profiles (skills, familiarity with the customer, etc.).
• Actionable Insights — Mine text and voice interactions for understanding the purpose of interactions, measure and compare against performance benchmarks, predict workloads and skills, identify non-compliance, and flag negative sentiment / inappropriate language.
• Agent Assistance — Guide and prompt live agents with the next best action throughout the customer interaction for faster response times, a higher first-contact-resolution rate, and happier agents.

The next step is harnessing the power of enterprise data, and making it easily accessible. Enterprises will move from representing their data in a schema-based model to an object and concept-based model. This enables better use of knowledge graphs to represent data in a natural language manner. This makes it possible for contact centers to access the full power of an enterprise’s data, accelerating the use of conversational interfaces.

Contact center vendors will leverage sophisticated transformer deep learning models for conversational interfaces. These models provide a more natural interface for customer queries and requests, supporting turn by turn interactions and context — better mimicking how humans speak. Conversational interfaces will also use multimodal interfaces such as touch, vision, and gestures to better and faster understand user intentions.

Ultimately, conversational interfaces will morph into virtual beings. These will be the new contact center agents. The personality, tone, and character of virtual beings will be aligned with the customer, providing a better and personalized customer experience. So, while this transformation will take time, it’s good to understand where things will be. Contact center functions will merge with both customer service functions and with enterprise data processing. It will be exciting times and we’re eager to see how quickly things progress.