What does the Call Centre of the Near-Future look like?
Jaime Scott
CX leadership | Keynote Speaker | On a mission to help sales and customer support teams reduce risk and improve CX
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The age of the customer has arrived, and the ever-growing needs of consumers are shaping almost every business in the UK, including the call centre. Simply put, the people who interact with your call centre expect consistent and high-quality experiences; whether they’re digital or human.
The good news is that this offers us an opportunity to rise and meet customer needs in a way that truly sets our call centres apart from the competition. At the same time, customers don’t care if building these experiences is hard or requires a complex, multifunction approach. They want fantastic experiences, and will go elsewhere if you can’t provide them.
What does the call centre of the near-future look like?
When it comes to digital transformation, the call centre has already come a long way. Customers who want answers fast, and call centre managers who want to minimise costs, means almost every call centre is now familiar with self-service and virtual customer service technology.
But is a shiny self-service portal enough to meet customer’s growing needs?
Unfortunately, the technology we use to predict and cater to customer issues isn’t perfect, yet. This means that whilst call centres are able to resolve common and simple customer issues automatically, the more complex, emotional and crucial interactions are still left to deal with.
This is where our trusty agents come in. Even though we’re making great strides in introducing intelligent and effective CX technology, people still like to talk to other people.
Old habits die hard, and a quick chat on the phone gives customers the responsiveness they need to quickly get to the bottom of trickier queries. In reality, this means the call centre of the future isn’t going to be ran by robots.
But what it does means is that we have a huge incentive to make sure agents can minimise costly repeat contacts, reduce damaging customer churn, and focus on providing an emotionally rich customer experience that technology simply can’t deliver just yet.