Summer Series: Evolution of the Contact Center Wrap-Up [Part 5]

They say all good things must come to an end – and our summer series is no exception. That being said, welcome to the last installment of the Evolution of the Contact Center! Thank you to everyone who has journeyed with us over the last four weeks as we reflected on the contact center of the past, present, and future.

If you’re just joining us – I’m highlighting a few takeaways from the last few weeks:

• Maybe in a perfect world, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as offered today, would be obsolete. And with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the contact center, that day is on the horizon. Until then, IVR can still be useful in improving the customer experience. In fact, in 2017 over 80% of calls are initially routed through an IVR¹. With the right IVR system, you can quickly identify callers and personalize the self-service flow.

• More than anything else, the shift to the cloud is transforming the contact center. Aside from eliminating the hardware hassles and expenses, the true benefits of the cloud – multi tenancy, elasticity, and agile delivery of features – enhance the customer and the agent experience. Equip your cloud contact center with the right tools, meaning flawless IVR and speech recognition, intelligent outbound dialing, multichannel options, and CRM integration – just to name a few. In doing so, you’ll keep your customers happy and your agents productive.

• The future of the contact center is bright – thanks to AI. According to Gartner, by 2021, 15 percent of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400 percent from 2017². Bringing AI into your contact center is an important step in delivering smarter, personalized experiences each and every time. Now that AI platforms are within view, is your contact center ready?

From switchboards to virtual agents, the contact center continuously undergoes significant technology-enabled transformations. We hope you enjoyed taking a look back and a peek into the future of the contact center – we sure did!

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¹Dimension Data’s 2017 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report, @ Dimension Data 2015 - 2017 

²Gartner CRM Vendor Guide, 2018