Every year we see technology evolving a notch higher to bridge the gap between customers and organizations in many ways. The year 2018 witnessed the rise of machine learning and AI that redefined customer service and success.

The present day tech enabled contact centers thrive on new trends and  contact center software that drive better engagement and facilitate smooth customer service delivery, both of which lie at the heart of a call center as we look into the new year – 2019.

 

It is time to look ahead and foresee how the call center software landscape will shift. What software trends are here to stay and which ones are here to make an impact? What specific software and tools will empower businesses and which ones will give an edge over competition? Here are five major software trends to watch out for in 2019.

#1 Omni Channel Communication

With smart devices, comes constant connectivity and this in turn reveals new insights about customer behaviour. A research by Google has previously established that 90 percent of the people owning multiple devices (phones, tablets and laptops) keep switching from one to another in order to complete certain tasks.

In 2019, call centers will be delivering omni channel service to maximize convenience and personalization. Repeating themselves to different agents is one of the biggest peeves that many customers have. Their interaction history as well as account history should be known to the agent that they are interacting with.

#2 Self Service Tools

According to Gartner prediction, by the year 2020 customers will be able to establish and manage 85 percent of their relationship with an organization without interacting with any human.

Several self service tools are coming up which are helping customers get assistance in a straightforward way without external assistance. While FAQs, resources are already there for customer assistance in knowing more about the organization and services, a plethora of other resources like virtual agents, tutorials, chatbots and flowcharts etc are in line to make things more convenient for the customer. This will make the customers independent to a large extent and ensure great service delivery at all times.

 #3 Artificial Intelligence

Companies will be more open to embracing artificial intelligence (AI). However, this does not point to regular agents becoming obsolete. The emerging trend says that the AI technology is to be used to enhance the call center agent’s capabilities and make them more efficient.

Things like skill based mapping, predictive dialers and automatic distribution of calls will be positively impacted by the integration of AI. This will result in better customer satisfaction and less stress experienced by the agents.

#4 Cloud deployment vs On Premise & Hybrid solutions

Today a lot of contact centers are going for cloud deployment because of the belief that it is cost effective and will be easy to deploy. But a lot of other factors like data sovereignty, customizations possibilities and network access also come into the picture.  On premise solution benefits the customer as the control of the data is in supervision of the call center and the technology provider does not have any control on to it. Even in case of multiple locations, Hybrid model do the job as set up can be on a centralized location where in the data and the services can be accessed by any connected location. A hybrid model is good for multiple setups as database is central and telephony is local.

#5 Improvement in Analytics

The present day contact centers are managing several communication channels to interact with their customers. In this scenario, supervision and overseeing of agents’ performance and data collection cannot be properly feasible. Analytic dashboards are increasingly being sought to be integrated in the contact center systems which will help management in capturing and analysing data with accuracy across all touchpoints. This will help in effectively monitoring agents’ performance and gauging customer feedback.

Real time updates can help managers as well as agents in improving performance and make better optimized processes.

 

Conclusion

With so many out of the box ideas and new facets trending, call centers today are set for a major revamp this year. Its an exciting time as the above five trends contain the potential to facilitate improvement across all quarters in a contact center.