Contact-center
09, June 2020
Contact Center Transformation is a Journey

Thanks to a plethora of new technologies, contact centers are going through transformations — one step at a time as shown in Figure 1. In traditional call centers (referred to as Basic in Figure 1), a call center agent must look at multiple screens for relevant information, gather them from disparate systems, consolidate them into a single message, and respond back to the customer. In addition, one other characteristic of traditional contact centers is that customers mostly use toll-free calls to reach out for help.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology played a critical role in eliminating the cumbersome task of cut-and-paste from multiple screens by consolidating them into a single screen. In addition, it helped in automating multiple back-end system tasks leading to faster turnaround time. This is referred to as an Intermediate step in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Contact Center Transformation journey

With customers demanding the use of social channels to reach out to businesses just like they use social channels to communicate with their friends and family, the next wave of transformation was triggered. This mode enables customers to use social channels in addition to using toll-free calls to reach out. Even text-based chatbots based on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology allows customers to interact with what are referred to as virtual agents. RPA is able to automate more complex processes. All of these changes bring about what is referred to as an Improved contact center in Figure 1.

Multiple channels of communication is different from omni-channel communication. A customer can reach out to the contact center using different channels (Toll-free call, Email, Chat, Whatsapp, Messenger etc.) but they can be in silo-es meaning that context is not preserved across the channels. When a customer uses Whatsapp to reach out and follows it up with a toll-free phone call, the contact center agent may not recognize the customer as the same person. This would require the customer to repeat his conversation with the agent. However, in omni-channel contact centers, the contact center agent can not only recognize the customer but has the full context including the highlights from the conversation. This is a big jump in the contact center systems, and it brings about hundreds of millions of dollars in opex reduction. With fully automated back-end leveraging the complete power of RPA, this is the Advanced contact center in Figure 1.

The final stage of contact center transformation involves a virtual agent who can converse with the customer in her language, understand her intent using full power of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in any language, not just English, fetch the correct response from a unified knowledge repository automatically created from enterprise data sources using AI/ML and transfer the call to a human agent seamlessly at the appropriate time when it cannot resolve the customer issue.

Different customers are in different stages of their journey in the transformation of contact center but those who are at the Advanced stage or the beginning of Cognitive stage have not only reduced the cost of operations by as much as 50%-70% but have also improved customer satisfaction dramatically, thereby retaining their customers, if not adding more.