What customer service challenges will the next generation of digital consumers bring, and how will businesses need to adapt? A glimpse into the future of customer service.
It’s the start of the school year, and the class of 2013 is settling into college life at campuses around the country. In a few years, these young men and women will enter the world as a new breed of consumer. They’ll join a growing legion of “Generation Y” and “Generation Z” customers — otherwise known as “digital natives” — who derive a large percentage of their information online, and are very comfortable juggling multiple communication channels.
Having grown up accustomed to instant access to information, and in a world of online social media, these Gen Y and Gen Z consumers bring with them a new set of requirements and expectations when it comes to customer service. While the phone (more and more the mobile phone) continues to be a primary method of communication, text messaging and online chat, and using social networks like Facebook and MySpace to have micro-conversations online, are also everyday channels and sources for information exchange and influence.
Given rapidly changing media options and consumer expectations, how will today’s businesses adapt five years down the road? What, specifically, will customer service look like in the year 2013 and beyond? And what are some key areas of innovation, insight and advantage that will help to fuel the business transformation necessary to thrive in these changing times?
When viewed holistically, in the year 2013 and even a decade from now, the practice of running a customer contact center may not be entirely different than how it’s done today. There will be a continued need for quick customer service response and first-call resolution from staff who are in the right place, with the right skills, at the right time. Center managers will continue to be concerned about managing schedules, keeping adherence in check, developing staff, retaining agents and customers alike, reducing operations costs and generating revenue. And there will continue to be a need, perhaps even a growing need, to ensure that service quality and agent performance is evaluated and developed.
In a more specific sense, there will be continued demand for fundamental and essential technologies that help automate the processes associated with efficiency and effectiveness. Interaction recording, coupled with quality assurance and staff forecasting and scheduling, will be as important in 2013 as they are now.
Five Key Areas That Will Evolve
While change within the contact center is generally deliberate, there are several key areas — both in terms of technology adoption and management practices — that will see significant evolution. These include the virtualization of the contact center; the rise in self-service; movement to home-based agents and the use of knowledge workers both within and outside the contact center; an increase in multichannel communications — including the kind and number of channels — in which agents/ customers interact; and further advancements in analytics — both in the business intelligence it delivers and how that insight manifests itself as a change agent enterprise-wide.
1. Contact Center Virtualization
Virtualization of the contact center is a continuing trend, and one that is accelerating. This momentum is projected to carry on over the next four to five years, and will continue to evolve as new technologies emerge.
This virtualization envisions a model in which customer service operations add especially skilled agents and other domain experts (i.e., back-office personnel and subject-matter experts) on an as-needed basis. With widespread broadband and mobile adoption accelerating, virtualization of the contact center can help businesses leverage relevant resources — whether they are agents working at a regional facility, employees at branch offices and retail locations, back-office knowledge workers at the company’s corporate headquarters or work-at-home agents — all with the singular purpose of providing excellent customer service.
As it evolves, contact center virtualization is poised to give rise to a single Web-based or Web-connected central portal where customer care professionals can manage virtual and physical resources that are part of a greater customer service operation.
Such a single central portal can provide managers with a consistent and integrated view of all relevant customer care workers, from at-home agents and those sitting at the brick-and-mortar contact center, to branch workers in the bank who can be maximized during non-peak periods, and backoffice personnel, such as those in fulfillment, claims processing, finance and other customer supporting departments.
While the possibilities of 24/7 availability and access to a greater set of knowledge workers hold appeal as part of the virtualized contact center model, there is also the added benefit of potentially receiving more localized, one-stop care.
2. The Rise in Self-Service
Another area experiencing a rapid change involves customer self-service. From voice services that provide directory assistance and customer service, to automated chat and virtual agents, self-service is poised to become smarter and more adept at handling customer queries. Of course, greater proliferation of customer self-service, whether through a Web interface or phone, will lead to a change in the role of the contact center agent as we know it today.
With self-service channels delivering answers to simple customer service questions, complex queries will continue to require a human touch. As such, this will necessitate training, development and, in some cases, new skills as customer service staff transition their roles to become more of a knowledge worker. In today’s world, information changes quickly — in fact, over the next decade, it’s expected to amplify even further.
The same holds true for availability and access to information. The result will be smarter consumers who are even more knowledgeable about products, brands and market trends. Organizations must ensure that their customer care professionals remain in tune and are equipped to keep pace — and even stay ahead — of the information wave. As such, training and coaching as we know it will take on a new level of importance, priority and frequency.
3. Changing Roles — Agents as Knowledge Workers; At-Home Staffing Models
Studies have shown that home agents often tend to be better educated, have more experience and the ability to bring a wealth of knowledge to their positions. However, as with on-premise contact center staff, home-based agents will need to stay ahead of the customer from a knowledge standpoint, further fueling the need for remote agent management. This means the growth of technologies that support distance learning, distance monitoring and distance forecasting and scheduling.
As agents move closer to becoming knowledge workers, key management challenges will emerge. To keep them engaged, businesses will need to reinvigorate their growth and retention strategies. This may mean better benefits (such as telecommuting options), along with better training and professional development.
A trickle effect also can be expected. Along with the changing role of the contact center agent, the supervisor’s role will need to evolve, as well. Supervisors are going to need new levels of personnel management and even technical proficiencies. Not all supervisors today are tech-savvy. Based on the systems they’ll be using, they’ll need to develop new and different skills. Because today’s workforce optimization technology automates the forecasting, scheduling, call recording and analytics functions, supervisors can spend more time coaching and developing staff — an aspect that will remain critical five and 10 years down the road.
There also will need to be a fundamental shift in that, currently, there are very few programs specifically designed to train this level of management on key issues inherent in virtual center and personnel operations, information management and dispersal, and multichannel communications. Forward-thinking organizations will start putting the models and programs in place now in anticipation.
4. Mastering Multichannel Customer Service
The media that businesses use to interact with their customers continues to expand exponentially. Traditional channels like voice calls to live agents, IVR systems, text messaging, Web chat and email are giving way to conversations and engagements that happen on social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
The question then becomes, which of these forms of customer service and interaction fall under the realm of the contact center and its managers? Take, for instance, Apple’s announcement in July 2009 about the availability of the Skype application on the iPhone, minus Skype’s video capability. It is not hard to imagine an iPhone with complete Skype capability trans- forming the device into the first practical videophone/ Web browser.
A new, powerful channel, such as the video-phone, might be useful in a successful market segmentation strategy, where your top customers have video access. It’s also not hard to imagine that company Web sites in 2013 may begin to look like today’s Second Life, where return site visitors use avatars and walk around the company Web site looking for useful information and having cyber-meetings with customer service reps.
Over the next several years, the role of an agent in the world of social media communications could shift dramatically — which, in turn, could change the composite of the types of staff organizations hire.
As multichannel communications grow, businesses also must consider the issues of integration and coordination. What if one channel is down — will that put greater strain on another? What are the contingency plans? Tight integration, both technically and from a management perspective, among the multiple communication channels will become even more essential. Consumers are interested in a seamless experience. They simply don’t care that your Web site is temporarily offline, or that your live agents are only available until 5 p.m. Processes must be in place that can nearly seamlessly move the customer from one channel to another — giving them the options they want at the time they need them.
5. The Power and Impact Inherent in Analytics
Regardless of which channel customers choose to do business, a key technology impacting the contact center now and into the future is analytics. Interactions with the contact center are recorded, and a percentage of those recordings are monitored and reviewed for quality assurance.
All of this data can be correlated to create a single view of a customer or customer segment. Analytics that mine call recordings and other customer service interactions can reveal emerging trends, consumer complaints, key topics of discussion among an organization’s customer base, competitive insights and so much more. Businesses can find out which customers are calling, emailing, chatting or visiting a store, along with how many of those inquiries are related to problems and basic customer service issues, for example.
While knowing what is happening is important, finding out why it’s happening so corrective action can be taken is vital to the life blood of the organization. Workforce optimization solutions that include speech analytics, data analytics and customer surveys are well positioned to play an increasingly strategic role now and into the future.
Taken further, by connecting existing business intelligence systems that monitor consumer buying patterns and demand levels with intelligence gathered through customer interactions, organizations can gain new insights with a 360-degree, holistic view.
That’s powerful information that companies can use to hyper-target and market to specific segments based on their collective needs, drive research and development efforts based on customer wants, and develop business practices that are driven by and aligned to direct customer input. This potential sharing of data and integration between contact center analytics with Web analytics and business intelligence tools has the potential to fundamentally change the ways that companies do business and interact with their customers.
Bill Durr is the Principal Global Solutions Consultant for Verint Witness Actionable Solutions. William.Durr@verint.com
– Reprinted with permission from Contact Center Pipeline, www.contactcenterpipeline.com