The Future of the Contact Center – 3 Trends for 2021

Distributed hybrid-working will become permanent in 2021, particularly in the contact center industry, which previously held the crown as one of the last mill-style working environments.

Organizations will need to remain agile and hybrid working helps to enable this. It will no longer be enough for contact center operators to lash together tools and technologies each time their operations are disrupted – they need to be established in the cloud with a workforce ready to work from multiple locations.

The demand for hybrid-working to continue is now two-fold – having experienced the benefits, employees are now pushing employers to offer this in the long-term. Businesses are beginning to realize that employee experience and customer experience are intrinsically linked – one drives the other. The value of tightly linking these, rather than improving each as an individual objective, is fundamental to overall business success.

This is extremely relevant in the contact center. With a greater interest in, and demand for, better agent experience, the opportunities for agents to work where they want must be available. This allows flexible shift patterns, greater freedom and healthier employee satisfaction rates – cutting down agent churn dramatically.

In 2021 we will see fully automated complex voice services come of age. We’ve long become used to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and first-gen Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as part of the contact center mix. Now the impact of AI-powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies is beginning to be felt across the industry.

Voice is still overwhelmingly the consumer’s preferred route for more complex queries, and these are increasingly being serviced through automation – either at the top of the call or during it – when a decision-ready query is passed over to the call agent together with the associated data and recommendations. In 2021, we’ll see NLP applied not only at the top of call but throughout – where stereo audio breakout enables platforms to analyze data from both caller and agent, in real-time. Integrations with knowledge management systems will then feed agents a continual stream of approved information to help them solve callers’ complex issues quickly and effectively.