From Cost Centre to Profit Centre

The global pandemic has rapidly accelerated the evolution of contact centres into something more than just problem-solving units.

As the many stories of overwhelmed and understaffed helplines demonstrate, this presented a significant challenge to unprepared businesses and governments. For many, the crisis exacerbated the familiar customer bugbears of fragmented experiences, long wait times, slow resolutions, repeated information, impersonal interactions and ineffective agents.

The pandemic came at a time when customer experience is not only becoming a strategic imperative for companies wanting to differentiate their brands, but customer communication channels are multiplying. Fortunately, the crisis also arrived at a pivotal moment when technology is changing the way companies view contact centres.

“With customer experience and retention becoming increasingly important, and the shift from physical to digital interactions increasing, the contact centre is now being viewed as a strategic differentiator and key influencer of the customer journey, versus old perceptions of being viewed as just a cost centre,” says Jamie Romanin, Head of Global Calling, Contact Centre & Experience Management at Cisco.

Rapid Evolution

Years of evolution have happened in the space of months, and for businesses that take a smart approach by adopting a service such as Cisco’s cloud-based Webex Contact Center, this represents an enormous transformational opportunity.

The pandemic has driven increased demand for AI-based self-service capabilities such as chat bots for online interactions and conversational IVRs for phone interactions, for example.

“One of Cisco’s AI case studies experienced an 11-time increase in incoming customer requests in a two-month period,” Romanin says. “They deployed Virtual Agents that handled more than 140,000 phone and web inquiries per day, while the phone Virtual Agent handled more than 40,000 after-hours calls per night.”

There is a pervading myth that such technology is designed to replace employees, that the future customer journey lies solely in human-machine interaction. On the contrary, enabling technology to handle the routine customer matters that consume thousands of agent hours (and fatigues them in the process) instead frees them up to deal more effectively with requests that require skill, knowledge and human interaction.

Imagine an everyday scenario: a customer calls a contact centre regarding a problem with a product. As the customer talks with the service agent, Cisco’s AI-powered Answers system listens to the conversation and suggests solutions to the agent in real time. Even better, by using machine learning, the system can predict future issues with similar customers and alert them to solutions before problems even arise.

This is what the new era of Cognitive Contact Centre looks like. By weaving technology, predictive analytics and personalised service into a single unified journey, the company not only retains happy customers but reduces costs.

The Experience Advantage

The benefits are self-evident. Surveys have found that three-quarters of customers cite experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions, and are willing to pay an average 17% more to deal with a company that provides that experience.

In Asia, the contact centre industry is worth more than USD30 billion and continuing to grow. Because companies in the region tend to be less constrained by legacy IT systems, they are able to adopt and experiment with new technologies more nimbly.

However, providing basic customer services at the lowest cost – which enabled the rapid growth in Asia’s contact centers in the past – is a model that’s fast becoming outdated.

Investing in technology that enables agents to deploy their knowledge and skills to provide the best experiences is the way forward. But companies wanting to deploy customer experience tools often face a number of obstacles. Many of those obstacles are partly the result of seeing contact centers as capital rather than operational expenditure, and partly because in-house technology adoption is seen as complex and fraught with risk.

The Cloud solution

Adopting a cloud-based cognitive contact centre model such as Webex overcomes these obstacles. In Asia, a growing focus on quality customer service is resulting in greater domestic investment in contact centres and professional agent training, according to a Frost & Sullivan study.

Accordingly, cloud contact centres in the region are beginning to take off. The sector is forecast to see a world-leading CAGR of 26% over the next four years, and will be worth USD7.5 billion by 2024, compared with USD1.9 billion last year.

“The most obvious advantages of a cloud model are scale, flexibility, and continuous innovation,” Romanin says. “The cloud opens the door to increased agility so that organisations can react quickly to unexpected changes. During the pandemic, businesses needed to scale their existing contact centre, or add a new one to manage volumes. Many were able to deploy the Webex Contact Center very quickly – within five days. Without a cloud-based model, this would not have been possible.”

Cisco offers a fully integrated suite of services, offering easy adoption of technology and access to new innovations, seamless multichannel experiences, and the ability to connect customers quickly to the right solutions – whether that is virtual assistants, human expertise, or both.

“The cloud allows for faster deployment and integration of new capabilities and technologies, giving all users instant access to new features without disrupting their workflows, while minimizing the impact on IT resources,” Romanin says.

“When the contact centre is integrated with the rest of your IT infrastructure, the more seamless agent experiences become, which increases their ability to provide better customer service, and the potential for new revenue opportunities and competitive advantage.”