What’s trending in the world of ‘customer interaction’ technology?

From the plethora of performance enhancing systems that no self-respecting Contact Centre should ever be without, it is always a little challenging for the discerning Contact Centre manager to find their way through the maze. How do you filter the ‘useful from the hype’, the ‘practical from the pretty’ and can you really believe all those ROI calculators?

If you are not too sure whether your ‘voice biometrics’ are in tune with your ‘interaction analytics’ or whether your ‘real time decisioning’ went out of sync when the clocks changed – this is for you!

So where is today’s smart money being spent?
Craig Pumfrey, Head of EMEA Marketing at NICE Systems comments “Organisations are capturing vast amounts of customer information and have recognised that interacting with it in real-time is key to gaining meaningful and usable insight. As a result real-time solutions including interaction analytics, customer feedback and agent guidance (whether cloud-based, or on premise) are coming to the fore.”

Talking of cloud, the recent Ovum ‘2013 Trends to Watch: Customer Experience and Interaction’ report, notes that a growing number of small and mid-sized enterprises are migrating to cloud contact centre platforms built around routing, ACD, and IVR. Business Systems has certainly noted increasing interest from customers including government and healthcare organisations seeking hosted smart routing and IVR technology to assist with cost effective handling of call volumes during peak periods.
The real growth area to watch according to Jonty Pearce, Editor of Call Centre Helper is “the use of speech analytics for quality monitoring applications. This seems to have moved in the past 12 months from the ‘early adopter’ phase into mainstream usage.” With entry level costs for the technology reducing, organisations are looking at analytics not so much as a business tool but as a building block to improving quality monitoring processes to help drive costs down and service levels up. Taking it to the next level with real time speech analytics, agents will be empowered to provide customers with relevant and timely offers personal to them at any point during a call and based on their unique set of circumstances – clever stuff!

So what does this all mean?
For smaller service-focussed organisations, cloud apps are driving down costs and increasing accessibility to leading edge recording, IVR and routing technology enabling them to compete with larger competitors.
For those organisations with bigger budgets but an eye on cost reduction and revenue growth, real time decisioning and speech analytics technology is a must for consideration and proof of concepts are increasingly becoming the norm to help de-risk the decision and identify achievable cost savings.

Interested? Contact us now or call 0800 458 2988 for more details.