Contact centres become intelligent

In recent years, there has been a steady trend in the contact centre for the adoption of unified communication solutions incorporating technologies such as VOIP and SIP. However, contact centres are beginning to see the emergence of a new trend - the intelligent contact centre.

As all businesses strive for improved efficiency and customer satisfaction, the next generation of analytics-based solutions are helping contact centres to predict, rather than simply meet the needs of customers.

The Yankee Group defines an intelligent contact centre solution as a single point of contact to provide quality customer care while also acting as an individualised marketing channel to push new products and services.

Current technologies are intelligent enough to enable agents to recognise callers by name, while tools such as presence management can facilitate increased efficiency when answering calls. However, the next generation of intelligent contact centre solutions build on these functionalities in helping to make the internal running of the call centre more intuitive and therefore productive; while at the same time helping to improve customer service.

Using analytics technology, the contact centre can gather information on a caller's buying history, preferences, historical patterns, geography, culture, account status, interests and whether or not they have accepted offers in the past. But more than this, by using analytics, contact centres will be able to detect a customer's mood, monitor the customer and agent's tone of voice and spot keywords that signal intent to buy or recognise a disillusioned customer.

By analysing the speech patterns of the caller and the agent, speech analytics software is able to recognise a range of emotions from 'neutral' to 'hot anger'.

Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales director for UK, Middle East and Africa.

Using this information, the contact centre will be able to deliver drastically increased customer experiences. As the contact centre begins to build up profiles of customers, it will be able to target them with information and offers that are relevant and spend less time pitching information that isn't. The result is that agents spend less time on unproductive calls, which in turn increases the profitability of the contact centre as a whole.

By analysing the speech patterns of the caller and the agent, speech analytics software is able to recognise a range of emotions from 'neutral' to 'hot anger'. Based on this information, the software can then direct the agent's actions to respond appropriately to each specific customer by dynamically initiating specific actions. For example, if a customer is displaying buying signals, a pop-up can appear on the agent's screen with a suggested script to help them close the deal.

With the majority of interactions within the contact centre still carried out via telephone, speech analytics can have a big impact on productivity, but what of the other forms of interaction made possible by unified communications? Many contact centres are keen to invest in solutions now that will enable them to benefit from the full possibilities of the future contact centre.

Embracing the concept of the intelligent contact centre, new technologies such as workforce optimisation can help to ensure the contact centre has the right amount of resources to meet the expected volume of calls. This allows managers to calculate the exact staffing needs to meet the varying demands of the contact centre. By looking at previous headcounts and volume of calls, the software can predict the number of agents required at any one time to manage the expected workload.

The software will then take these forecasts and match them against the contact centre schedules, ensuring there are sufficient levels of staffing at all times, and avoiding costly overstaffing.

When used in conjunction with a unified communications solution, workforce optimisation can be particularly effective as the forecasts will take into account inbound and outbound calls as well as e-mails, SMSes and all other types of interaction.

The range of additional functionalities that these intelligent solutions can offer to the contact centre can have a significant impact on its running. And importantly, agent error and dependency can be reduced.

By using speech analytics, managers can identify a particular agent's area of weakness and then train them either by playing back calls, or through whisper coaching in the agent's headset during a call.

In addition, instead of relying on the need for experienced agents, adept at handling a difficult customer, the speech analytics software can recognise an angry caller and automatically display prompts on the agent's screen to help them resolve the situation. As this requires less skill on the agent's part, there is a reduction in the need for training, and the effect of agent turnover is also reduced.

A contact centre is a complex technology environment. For companies wanting to take advantage of the future benefits of intelligent contact centres, investing in an intelligent solution now will allow the business to grow and expand to meet customer needs, while improving operational efficiency within the contact centre.

* Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales director for UK, Middle East and Africa.