Which contact center technologies for customer service deliver the most business value?

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We know that the contact center solution ecosystem that customer service organizations use is made up lots of complex technologies, as highlighted in our latest TechRadar™report. So how, do you know what technologies are the right ones to invest in – the ones that will deliver real business value?

To figure this out, Forrester partnered with CustomerThink to survey customer service organizations to understand the adoption rate of 18 contact center technologies. We also looked at the business value that these technologies deliver as defined by three questions: 1) How critical is each to business success? 2) What is the technology’s market reputation for value? 3) How difficult is it to implement and use? Here are our highlights, and you can find actual statistics in our report:

  • Solutions that focus on improving productivity have the most certain business value-add. Core contact center technologies enable agents to manage voice calls from customers via IVRs, log and manage inquiries via case management systems, provide standardized answers via knowledge management solutions, manage the quality of service delivered via quality monitoring solutions and for enterprise customers, optimize the scheduling of agent workforces. These solutions are mature, have a good market reputation among buyers, and they continue to deliver significant business success.
  • Electronic communication channels also provide business value when deployed. Not all organizations deploy chat or email solutions, but for those that do, these channels are critical to their business success.
  • Social technologies have mixed reputation. Customer communities have excellent reputations, but are seen as moderately critical and moderately difficult to implement. Social listening technologies are seen as moderately critical, with low barriers to implement, yet suffer from a mixed reputation for results. Social adapters, used to capture service inquiries from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are still seen as optional, but have low barriers to implementation.
  • A set of unrelated, complex technologies have the most uncertainty. Speech analytics, and virtual agents are viewed as optional in importance, difficult to implement, and offering low business-value add which relegate them to niche uses. Unified agent workspaces also are categorized as having uncertainty, primarily due to the fact that and these applications have been mostly subsumed into more comprehensive solutions that involve guiding agents through service resolution process flows.

Are you investing in the right technologies to ensure you are delivering a customer service experience in-line with the expectations of your customers?

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Kate Leggett
Kate serves Business Process Professionals. She is a leading expert on customer service strategies. Her research focuses on helping organizations establish and validate customer service strategies strategies, prioritize and focus customer service projects, facilitate customer service vendor selection, and plan for project success.

1 COMMENT

  1. Interesting that social technologies, for all the Zappos-fueled hoopla, is perceived as having mixed results.

    As with almost anything having to do with engineering, architecture, or information technology, the real challenges businesses face have much more to do with how components, materials, and technologies are used. To carry that thought forward, it’s not the technologies themselves that deliver business value, but how they’re deployed. Learning about that would be a great topic for a follow-on study. . .

    But at least knowing what’s involved in the mix is a good start.

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