Digital transformation for contact center survival

Call center digital transformation

While customer contact centers are the heartbeat of any business service or product driven by after-sales services, the time spent delivering these services is starting to become a burden for call center agents. By adopting the latest digital transformation technologies and strategies, you can reduce the manpower and money spent on-call operations and replace them with smooth, automated chatbot services.

Whether you’re dealing with a difficult customer or simply answering frequently asked questions, business owners are constantly challenged by the need to adapt communication channels that help to expand on their customer service efforts while making internal operations more streamlined and effective.

The future of customer contact centers

Because of the constant updates in applications and back-end technologies, it’s becoming significantly easier for agents to automate more tasks and perform others that require more human interaction. As it stands, the key aim for contact centers is to change according to current digital transformation trends. Businesses need to learn how to achieve high customer satisfaction, regardless of the channel the customer chooses to use when communicating with them.

Artificial resources such as chatbots are mainly used to deliver predetermined messages, such as account details, shipping updates, and delivery status updates. However, by pairing agents and chatbots together, you’ll be able to expand on your AI’s knowledge by having them learn from your agents. While business owners might feel the need to cut out the human element in contact center communication, it’s important to refrain from automating everything simply to cut costs – there are still plenty of areas within the business where human contact is necessary. After all, having a friendly human voice goes a long way. It still continues to be one of the only ways to give the best possible impression of unique, personalized customer service.

Related: Chatbots and humans are better together

The benefits of digital transformation

In the future, businesses will need to implement a workforce of software robots. These artificial workers will help to ensure that the basic work is done in areas that will no longer be dependant on humans. And, while there will be more chatbots communicating with customers to show them that ‘always on’ approach to business, companies will need to upskill agents for the times when customers do feel the need to speak to a human about something more complex. The combination of chatbots and bulk messaging will also help to drive productivity and give customers the immediate assistance they require.

Here are a few reasons why the fast adoption of smart digital technologies is essential to contact center survival:

Social media: Social media plays an important role in most young people’s lives. As a result, companies need to step up their social game and embrace the different communication tools and platforms to help strengthen their engagement and ensure that it’s more personalized. For customers, their perception of the brand comes from the way they communicate online and how humanized their approach is. Businesses need to constantly provide the same instant help via social channels as they would via SMS and voice calls.

Rising competition: Across the globe, businesses are adopting the latest digital transformation trends to try and create better relationships with their customers and to keep them satisfied. These small changes can quickly become deciding factors when customers have to choose between companies, so make it your mission to meet customer expectations and make a difference in your communication channels.

Demand for omnichannel: Customer behaviors change in the blink of an eye, which ultimately creates a ripple effect for businesses. To get ahead, businesses need to take advantage of a unified omnichannel support system to help create a personal relationship with their customers. For example, having all customer data saved in the Cloud or on a central hub so that the next time the same customer contacts them, customers won’t have to repeat themselves with each new agent they speak to.

Get ahead of the game

Every interaction is an opportunity to change your approach. Whether you’re working with artificially intelligent resources and chatbots or having your agents communicate directly with your customers, the analytics generated should be used to plot new customer journeys and satisfy your customers. From now onwards, it’s all about shaping the ideal virtual customer relationship. And if you want to be ahead of your competitors, it’s time to take advantage of these tools. To learn more about the benefits of chatbots for your contact center, read more about our innovative platform Clickatell Touch. It combines machine learning with workflow automation and human-in-the-loop to deliver on-demand customer service.