Published on the 25/05/2016 | Written by Brendan Maree
The power of exponential progress and increasing rate of disruption is very much in evidence in the contact centre, says Brendan Maree…
It’s a natural human tendency to see progress from a linear perspective in which advances happen at a steady and predictable pace. Yet, increasingly, this is no longer the case. Throughout the world, many developments are now occurring at an exponential rate. They might start slowly, but after a short period their evolution takes on a pace that’s hard to comprehend. A great example is the Human Genome Project which began the task of fully sequencing human DNA in 2003. Seven years into the project only one percent of the three billion base-pairs that constitute human DNA had been sequenced, and experts predicted it would take around 700 years to complete the entire task. In reality, however, completion took less than seven more years and, today, a human genome can be sequenced in just a few hours. This is an example of the power of exponential progress. The pace of technology A key driver in this trend is the fact that everything is becoming information. When things become information, they can be manipulated and transmitted in ways that change all the rules. In the business world, the implications of this change are staggering. Businesses that are in a position to leverage information are able to gain a significant competitive advantage over those that are not. Physical assets and capital expenditures are increasingly becoming liabilities rather than a benefit to a business. It’s information and the ability to use it that is key. The bottom line is that every business is at risk of being disrupted by these dramatic advances and changes. Uber is a disruptor in the transportation sector, Bitcoin in finance, Amazon in retail, and Tesla in the automotive space. Disruption has become the new normal. Disruption in the contact centre The following are key areas in which disruption can assist the contact centre: Shifting IT systems and resources from in-house data centres to cloud-based platforms is a disruptive step that can deliver big benefits. It simplifies the entire contact centre architecture and removes many impediments to change as capacity can be scaled up and down quickly as required. It also improves security as a single physical location can be more easily secured than a dispersed infrastructure housed across multiple locations. The cloud provider assumes responsibility for everything from security software patches to locks on doors. A cloud platform also facilitates the collection of large amounts of data, which can then be analysed to identify new trends and business opportunities, giving a business a significant competitive advantage. Today customers expect more than just phone conversations when interacting with a contact centre agent. They are keen to use email, web chat and even social media, and want to do as much as possible from their favourite mobile device. While much attention is given to the omnichannel contact centre, customer desire is taking this to the next level: multimodal interactions. This recognises that a customer may want to use more than one communication method in the course of a single interaction – think seamlessly moving from a web chat to a video session with screen sharing. Further personalising these multimodal interactions are virtual reality tools, which are fast maturing. Exponential development in the field of computational power and artificial intelligence (AI) also has the potential to assist in the contact centre. AI tools – machine learning in particular – can be put to work to proactively identify problems and recognise trends in large amounts of data, achieving insights that human beings simply cannot. Taking this a step further is deep learning, which is based on a set of algorithms that model very high-level abstractions from huge data sets using sophisticated methods of self-learning. With customer service now the job of every employee, the convergence of customer engagement and collaboration technologies is inevitable. Think how valuable it would be for a contact centre to have subject-specific chat rooms that include agents and business users to far more quickly address specific customer issues? And from this same application, imagine if an agent could quickly look up a subject matter expert and send an instant message to receive real-time assistance, thus avoiding a transferred call or call back? Conclusion It’s clear that if businesses embrace rather than resist disruptive trends, they will position themselves for future growth. For contact centres, disruptions such as cloud computing and AI present significant opportunities to improve internal operations and boost customer service levels. Disruption has become the new normal. Brendan Maree is the senior vice president Australia, New Zealand and Japan for call centre technologies and software solutions provider Interactive Intelligence.
Aside from the life sciences, exponential change is most evident in information technology. In a trend that can be traced back to Moore’s Law, the power of computer chips is doubling every two years. Meanwhile the cost of data storage is falling while the capacities of communication networks are rising – all exponentially.
This increasing pace of disruption is also happening in the contact centre. Here, the operators that succeed in the future will be those that embrace this disruption rather than fight it.
ABOUT BRENDAN MAREE//
