Customer-focused innovation that works

Now that companies have less and less face-to-face customer contact due to the pandemic, the contact centre has become the place where the relationship with the customer must be nurtured and developed. The customer experience has become the competitive tool of choice, and in a world where the customer’s behaviour and needs are changing at breakneck speed, the necessity for innovative technologies and automation in the contact centre is increasing.

It is simply no longer possible to ‘manually’ keep track of developments, let alone respond to them in a timely manner. Those who do not invest in innovation run into an unbridgeable deficit 

AI in customer contact

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making huge strides in the contact centre. More and more companies no longer see the investment in AI platforms as a ‘nice to have' but as an indispensable part of the growth strategy. The only quick and scalable solution in keeping up with developments in customer contact.

AI can be deployed in the contact centre in a myriad of ways. For example in chat and voice bots, so customers actually receive an answer instead of being transferred to a service employee after a lot of time and frustration. And what about Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse customer sentiment in interactions with contact centre employees, and to make suggestions based on that to help the customer? Yet another application of AI is predictive routing, where algorithms based on behaviour and personality find the best employee (or a bot!) to help a particular customer.

Visual customer interactions

But other innovative technologies can also contribute to an optimal customer experience in the contact centre, for example by making customer contact visual where possible. The application of augmented and virtual reality is a good example of this, as is the use of video in customer contact.

There are countless innovative technologies that can optimise the customer experience. But no single tool is the be-all and end-all on its own. It is about combining and integrating different solutions, creating a well-oiled system that truly benefits the customer – and thus the business results.