The Contact Center in 2018: Helping Customers Help Themselves

Also critical going forward will be the ability of chatbots to escalate to live agents if necessary. “That warm transfer piece is kind of the magic here” and traditionally has been a stumbling block for many companies, Ragsdale argues.

“It really is required that you do that because you don’t want to say, ‘OK, this has become too complex for chat, we’re going to have to go to phone.’ I’ve heard horror stories of companies that say, ‘But our chat agents don’t have a phone on their desk, so we’re going to transfer you to a phone agent and you can start all over again.’ That’s absolutely what you don’t want to do.”

LEVERAGING SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

To that same end, companies in 2018 will step up deployments of sentiment analysis in their contact centers to help agents deal better with customers.

Greenberg expects companies like Cogito that offer the technology to “continue to grow significantly.” Cogito’s emotional intelligence solutions analyze customer voices to predict the outcomes of calls and to assist agents to take action that might save calls that are going horribly awry. While such technologies exist, they have yet to be adopted by a large number of companies. “We’ll see that increase,” Greenberg says.

Jamison agrees, pointing out that these technologies fit in with the notion of catering to agents by giving them the proper tools to do their jobs better. This includes access to better knowledge bases, guided resolutions, and next-best actions.

Equally important will be pop-ups that appear onscreen to guides agents based on a real-time analysis of conversations as they unfold. Take, for example, an agent at a debt collection agency. She might call a debtor only to learn that the person has declared bankruptcy. A speech analytics engine running in the background could identify the emotional turmoil in the person’s voice and direct the agent to be more sympathetic, surfacing a script that reads “I’m really sorry to hear that. Which kind of bankruptcy did you declare?”

“That’s extraordinarily empowering, because then you don’t have an agent that’s just stumbling along and reading through a script and upsetting the person further, because they don’t want to get those calls,” Jamison says.

Bringing those capabilities to chatbot technology is a natural progression. “We’ll start seeing more of the chatbots themselves doing sentiment analysis,” Greenberg says, maintaining that if a customer expresses concern or worry, chatbots will have more flexibility in how they try to alleviate the concern.

AUTOMATE WHEN POSSIBLE

But chatbots and other self-service technologies are not the only innovations that are going to make waves across the contact center industry in 2018. As a rule of thumb, organizations would be wise to automate whenever and wherever possible and give contact center agents the tools they need to get their jobs done, most experts contend.

Leggett points to an insurance firm that handles about 5 million calls every year. After each of the calls, agents spent on average about 10 seconds classifying each case. “They realized that if they added real-time speech or text analytics, they could do classification automatically and more accurately than the human agent.”

Cutting 10 seconds off 5 million calls a year ended up saving the company $8 million during the first year of deployment, she says. It reduced the amount of busy work agents had to do after each call and allowed agents to better connect with customers.

Leggett and Fluss both also tout AI-driven call routing as a technology to consider in 2018. In fact, Fluss says advances in “adaptive, real-time intelligent routing” will allow companies to lower operational costs by efficiently routing omnichannel contacts to the appropriate agents the first time.

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