The 4 Technologies That Have Driven the Contact Center Revolution

In its origin, the contact center had the objective of maintaining communication between the companies and their customers, but soon the companies realized that these quick solutions were not feasible in the long term since they usually lack sufficient performance, functionality or integration with other applications.

For this reason, the sector saw the need to look for new ways to improve towards a digital environment. Precisely, digitization has experienced an explosion due to the pandemic and it is estimated that in the last 8 months it has advanced as much as in the last eight years, and in the case of contact centers, it has helped to automate and continue to improve processes. As a result, the contact center sector grew 41% last year.

This digitization has led to the emergence of new contact center models, such as those based on the cloud, which do not require a physical space for their development and which are being adopted by organizations that need an open communication channel with their customers, and by SMBs, which lack the resources to make use of larger or specialized contact centers. For this reason, masvoz, a company with more than 19 years of experience in communications services for businesses, analyzes the technologies that have fostered the impulse of the sector towards more accessible and decentralized contact center models.

The 4 Technologies That Have Driven the Contact Center Revolution

• CRM can be considered the cornerstone of some contact centers since all communication channels with the customer are connected there. This multichannel service generates a large amount of information about the user, which can be even more useful if, in addition, it is effectively combined with the data that the company has accumulated historically and that is obtained thanks to the CRM. The integration of the contact center software with the CRM is key to obtaining a comprehensive vision of the client that allows companies to know them in a real way and, thus, be able to offer them the solutions and answers that they really need at all times, adding value differential to each management. In Spain, according to a study by Zendesk, 91% of companies with more than 11 employees use some type of CRM software.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) also helps companies to have a much more personalized communication with customers, facilitating assistance to users 24/7 while optimizing the time of agents dedicated to answering queries. Customer experience and contact centers are great starting points for implementing AI solutions. For example, chatbots are evolving rapidly and will help customers have useful and personalized interactions with companies, with faster and more accurate resolution of their problems. In this sense, Gartner predicts that by 2022 70% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies such as chatbots or instant messaging. In addition, the giant leaps in speech processing technology and natural language processing (NLP), which deals with the interaction between computers and humans using natural language, are opening great opportunities to improve the accuracy and efficiency of call centers.

• The cloud provides flexibility and scalability to contact centers, so much so that 57% of companies have already migrated or are planning to migrate their contact centers to the cloud. In the current situation, with agents spread over different geographical areas, the cloud is a key element for accessing a single interface and the complete history of customer interactions directly from the web thanks to centralized management. The cloud contact center market will reach $ 44.86 billion by 2025. Additionally, the cloud makes it faster and easier to integrate inbound and outbound communication channels, such as email, phone, WhatsApp, and social networks, among others.

• 5G connectivity already plays a key role in business communications thanks to its higher access speed – up to 20 times faster – but this is not the only benefit. On the one hand, it influences the audio quality, which is much higher thanks to this technology that supports the VoNR (Voice over New Radio) system, a voice technology with lower latency, better sound quality and higher image quality in video calls. In addition, on the other hand, VoIP technology makes greater use of the connection offered by 5G, since it can adjust to the demand and connected devices, creating independent and dedicated parallel networks. This technology is already beginning to make its mark in the communications sector and it is foreseeable that more and more professionals will adopt virtual numbers based on applications for business calls, video conferences and team meetings under a 5G network.

In addition to technological factors, after the declaration of the state of alarm, in March 2020, teleworking emerged as the new work model. This is something that also affected the contact center environment and that, nowadays, the trend is to promote and favor the work of agents from their homes, totally or partially, through hybrid systems. This is possible thanks to cloud solutions, with which you can work remotely with the necessary applications as if it were the office, without interruptions or the need for facilities; and safeguarding the security required by corporate teams.

“The growth of this new, more informal and disruptive approach to contact centers has recently been driven by two factors: continued advances in technology and the pandemic. As we all know, in 2020 companies had to turn very quickly towards a new model to follow in the market and much of the customer experience was reduced to a digital display. The technology opens the functionalities of the professional contact centers to a much wider public and can contribute to the growth of the communication sector in general,” explains Santi Vernet, commercial director of masvoz.