What Does the Future Hold for Your Contact Center?

With so many new year predictions for 2017, I’m reminded that I wrote how The Jetson’s—a 1960’s prime-time cartoon—correctly predicted several future innovations including personal computer assistants, video calls, and more. Granted, it took several decades for these ideas to come to fruition. But for today’s contact center pros, we don’t have that kind of time. Tomorrow’s innovations are staring us right in the face and shifting the way we work—for the better.

Is It Tomorrow Yet?

In reviewing your 2017 budget, think about nascent innovations that are set to explode—things like chatbots and the IoT. Preparing for them today will make your future that much brighter. And according to IDC, “Preparing for the future could be your most important task, today.”

If you are in the strategic planning phase, you’re not alone. The Dimension Data 2016 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report finds that most contact centers are planning technology updates within the coming year. You can see where those updates might best occur using the chart below, showing what other surveyed companies are planning.

As you can see, the biggest areas of focus are around web chat, mobile apps, automated services, including IoT and social media.  Where is your organization looking to invest?

Time to Fast Forward

The holy grail of the contact center is anticipating customer needs so that engagement is more efficient, and where appropriate, more proactive. As the future takes shape, it’s clear that the cloud is the core mechanism for delivering new capabilities that address fluctuating customer need and for integrating organizational silos and systems. Legacy contact centers often struggle to keep up with the consumer demands for new paths to connection. They’re finding that it’s not so simple to plug new technologies—such as mobile, web chat, IoT, social, and analytics—into legacy systems. But that’s changing. By 2020, IDC forecasts that spending on cloud services will nearly equal what is spent on traditional IT.

Where Do You Fit in to This Future?

For many, these significant changes will have a big impact on existing contact centers, with new technologies enabling better customer engagement, innovative customer journey analytics, and streamlined proactive communications. No doubt, the future holds some amazing advances that will change the role of the contact center in tomorrow’s organizations. It’s critical that we understand what’s coming.

No Crystal Ball? No Problem—Our On-Demand Webinar Explores Tomorrow’s Trends

IDC, a leading analyst firm, regularly measures trends and projects directions that technologies and companies will take to embrace future business changes. Instead of delving through reams of studies yourself, have a look at our on-demand webinar, in which Mary Wardley from IDC and I explore how the contact center of tomorrow won’t resemble the call center of yesterday.

This webinar is a great way to learn more about what customers are demanding today and the cost effective moves you can make to address these needs. It also takes a look at the biggest concerns about moving to the cloud, including:

• Data protection, security, and compliance
• TCO: cloud versus on-premise
• Culture biases and limitations of the cloud
• Integration and customization
• Picking the right cloud platform vendor

Learn more about what’s coming and how to fend off competitors by embracing this future, and moving your contact center into the modern age. We explore the current contact center and customer trends and how the cloud is changing the way in which companies deploy new technology. We’ll also demonstrate how a cloud contact center can be a key tool in helping you improve customer engagement in some important ways. It’s a webinar you won’t want to miss.

And don’t miss our white paper, Contact Center Manager’s Roadmap to Future in the Cloud, either.