How can I help you?

In the current economic climate, companies simply cannot afford to lose customers. This means customer service must always be spot on, from the point of sale and well beyond, and a very large part of that is in the contact centre. So how are companies going to make sure that every customer contact results in complete satisfaction? Avaya’s Rob Wells provides an overview of the future of contact centres and the important impact this will have on business.

How we communicate with a contact centre is going to change to the benefit of customer experience: everyone is familiar with a phone number, a physical address, email address or an online form as a means of business communication. New technologies are on the way that will further improve the customer experience.

A few people might have experienced SMS or instant messaging (IM), and these will become ubiquitous. Speech recognition has drastically improved and is continuing to do so, ending irritating automated telephone ‘services’. These will become highly sophisticated and helpful, recognising real speech as well as expanding in remit - eg, a bank might initiate an automated outbound call to a customer who has made a transaction that puts them over their overdraft limit. Instead of an unpleasant surprise on the next bank statement, the customer could be offered the chance to shift funds from a savings account or delay the transaction until after the next payday.

Voice recognition is reaching the point where a customer can be reliably identified by just a few spoken words. Like a fingerprint, a voice is unique to the individual - and extremely difficult to forge, since many elements and qualities of a person’s voice (dialect, speaking style, pitch) are all factors in its uniqueness. Now things get really interesting: speech analytics technology can analyse calls and extract useful information from them, eg, emotional context can be deduced by analysing volume, pitch and word spotting (words like ‘great’ and ‘fantastic’) for indications of the caller’s mood. In conjunction with speech and voice recognition, this can give real-time advice to agents and help judge performance retrospectively.

Also on the agenda is video, an innovative contact centre application. Imagine booking concert tickets and being able to see the venue’s seating plan, or the view from the seats you’re considering.

There are two powerful motivators for change: first, as already mentioned, companies just can’t alienate customers in today’s economic climate. Second, the companies themselves will benefit in significant ways from implementing these changes: research commissioned by Avaya earlier this year found that only 17% of European firms offer employees the flexible working options needed to underpin round-the-clock customer service, despite the fact this is what 91% of users demand. 89% of these respondents also said they would pay a premium for this service, so companies that don’t offer it are not meeting customer needs and missing out on revenue opportunity.

A final piece of food for thought is the extended contact centre, or the business ready to serve at all levels. Today, it is already possible for an agent to be automatically notified if the ‘resident expert’ is available and how best to contact them, making it easier and faster to find the right people to resolve the customer query. And the best part about all this is that it is not science fiction: unified communications solutions of this sort are available today.

* Rob Wells is the Managing Director, Avaya Australia and New Zealand, based in Sydney. He is responsible for leading Avaya’s operations across ANZ, including the sales and support of the company’s technology, applications and industry-specific businesses.

The role also includes responsibility for business planning and strategy development, customer care, marketing and management of Avaya’s channel partner programs.

Prior to Avaya, Wells worked as Asia Pacific Vice-President of Field Operations for SAP/Business Objects and, prior to that, held various senior management roles at PeopleSoft, Sequent and Unisys.