“We’re all part of an industry that is routinely used as material by stand-up comedians,” says Steven Cooper, Operations Director at Kingston Communications Contact Centres, a provider of contact centre services to both the public and private sector: “We need to think about this. Customers frequently complain about the call centre industry, and if it is to be thriving in 2015, all this will have to change.”
Alastair Trower, Product Marketing Manager EMEA, at call centre software provider, FrontRange Solutions, agrees: “Until now, much call centre development has concentrated on internal efficiency savings. By contrast, the call centre of 2015 will be focused on delivering a premium quality service to the customer based on the value of that customer to the business.”
Certainly, given the pace and extent of change over the past decade, it would be surprising if the next nine years did not bring great change to the call centre industry. Predicting the future is always difficult, but one thing seems certain: a lot will change, and technology will remain at the forefront of those changes.
In call security and profiling
Albert Selzer, Managing Director at Spescom Datavoice predicts that security will become more and more important to the call centre industry. He says: “There have already been significant advances in the technology that is available to help protect customer data. Most notably, biometric speaker recognition is now a feasible solution for many call centres.”
Selzer believes that the type of call recording offered by his company will be useful for more than simply security. He says: “The technology is already available to record and then analyse calls, but businesses have not yet realised the potential value of turning this raw material into intelligence. Sorting recorded voice by gender, language, content and even specific speaker can allow you to do some very useful profiling.”
IP comes of age
While these developments will all be important, most in the industry agree that the most significant change will be the completion of the transition to IP based systems. The shift from ACD exchanges is well underway, and is certain to accelerate. Richard Farrell, Technical Principal of Netcall, providers of hosted callback technology, says: “The call centre of 2015 won't look so very different on the outside. But the way it functions on the inside will be radically different. ACDs and other call centre hardware will have disappeared altogether or alternatively some legacy systems may still provide connectivity to the agents. Either way, all the intelligence and functionality of the call centre will be located in the carrier network."
Intelligent routing
This shift to IP will have significant effects. Paul Scott, Director of Customer Interactive Solutions at Dimension Data gives his view on what they will be: “We will find ourselves truly in the age of intelligent routing. Contact centres may be smaller in 2015, but there may be more people actually engaged in customer service than today. They might not be full-time customer service agents, but their expertise and specialist skills mean that they are ideal resources for dealing with specific customer issues. They might be working at home, or on the move. The intelligent routing application of 2015 will know when and where specialist resources are available and will connect them with customers where applicable.”
Not everyone agrees with Scott’s predictions. James Dwyer, European Technical Services Manager at Talisma Europe, a software solutions provider says: “The technology to have every employee accessible through centralised intelligent routing might well be available by 2015, and on the surface it sounds like a great idea. The problem is that it just won’t work. Consider the frustration to the employees who are suddenly thrust onto the front line, being interrupted by routed calls, having to record details of the calls, and suffering decreasing productivity in their main job role. I think we are in fact likely to see call centres growing and becoming more fully integrated with the rest of the business.”
Fully multichannel
For Ken Wheeler, Sales and Marketing Director at SITEL UK, the most exciting aspect of the transition to IP is that the long-promised era of the multichannel contact centre will finally become a reality. He says: “IP is practically standard already and the call centre of 2015 will be a contact centre rather than a call centre, in that there will be a seamless blend of communications, not just telephone but also email, SMS and webchat. Contact centres will be technologically equipped to deal with all forms of communication.”
He also believes that this will allow contact centres to manage their customer relationships more effectively. He adds: “All of these communications will be brought together in a unified queue and there will be a record of all contact from a customer. For instance, if a customer sends a text message and then calls an hour later, agents will know it’s the second time that customer has been in contact with them. All of this will help enhance client services by offering more choice and flexibility.”
Growth in self-service
By 2015 BT will have fully introduced its 21CN service, a single end-to-end IP-based network that will replace the multiple analogue networks that BT currently operates. Consumers will contract to one of half a dozen service providers for all of their television, phone, mobile, video-on-demand, web, e-mail, instant messaging, and SMS. BT’s plan for 21CN envisages a simple, personalised service for consumers, shaped according to their needs, with self-service management wherever possible.
Ken Hitchen, Consultancy Director at Sabio believes that this commitment to self-service is likely to have a significant impact on the 2015 contact centre. He says: “Most organisations now understand that self-service isn’t poor service. It’s increasingly the UK consumer’s preferred way of doing things. By 2015 this will have gone further. The 21CN will include a software console that the consumer will use to manage their own service accounts with organisations such as banks, insurance companies, travel and holiday firms and groceries.”
People
Despite all of this technological change and the possible rise of self-service, people will remain the most important aspect of a call centre. Bill Esterson, Managing Director at training consultancy Leaps & Bounds, says: “There will be a divide between those who use more technology and those who use less. On the one hand, many call centres will try to cut the human element out of the transaction and automate as much as possible. However, the most successful businesses by 2015 will recognise that they need to offer the choice to customers about whether to use an automated system or to speak to an adviser.”
He continues: “Technology will have a crucial role to play as a tool to help staff provide great service. However, those call centres that try to use technology without considering the human element will struggle. My advice for the call centre of 2015 would be to give your staff the technology and the support to use it to help them serve the customer. Don’t try to replace people with systems, as, if you do, your customers will reject you.”
Migration
To compete in 2015 every contact centre will need to use IP technology to offer customers seamless contact across channels, routing queries to the most suitable employees. They will need to provide ever more sophisticated security and to use call and customer data ever more intelligently. They will need to do all this while remembering that people remain the most important part of any contact centre.
Forward-looking contact centres are preparing themselves now for this revolution, as Alex Connors, Call Centre Product Manager at Cable and Wireless describes: “Migration will be absolutely essential. Telecommunications providers are working hard to ensure that migration is as painless and smooth as possible but it is a hurdle that we all have to face at some stage. Within the next 18 months, businesses need to develop a clear roadmap of how and when migration will take place so as to ensure there is confidence in the process.”
Gordon Loader at Avaya agrees: “All contact centres are business critical. There’s not one of them that can afford to be out of action while a new system is introduced. This is why it’s so important that migration is done effectively and why we’ve developed tools that can effect the migration without any impact on agent activity.”
He goes on to conclude: “This revolution is happening. If you don’t do something about it now, you’ll soon be using yesterday’s technology to tackle tomorrow’s challenges. I’d advise anyone who is running a call centre to look into this and to act now.”
Alex Blyth is a freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom and a frequent contributor to CMPi’s CCF Magazine.
