The enhanced customer and transaction data analysis delivered by contact centre systems vendors is allowing centres to affect the outcome of interactions and create more opportunistic conversations.
However, despite this emergence of real-time decision-making, contact centres are slow to adopt. That’s according to research analyst Aphrodite Brinsmead who explains this is because some are waiting for future development of the technology whilst others are subject to internal and cultural barriers. Others yet are either confused or unaware of the potential benefits of real-time information due to suppliers’ lack of ROI studies, she says.
“However, Ovum believes that RTD will rapidly become a differentiator for enterprises looking to drive collaboration across departments and improve the customer experience,” says Brinsmead.
She explains that the RTD solutions market is still in its infancy with few fully productised offerings available, making it difficult to know which vendor’s solution presents the best fit for customer service. Brinsmead outlines Oracle and [24]7 as providing the most sophisticated offerings, which “function as adjuncts to customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence, and are designed to unify the many data silos that exist within a company.”
She also highlights the high level of integration required to collate data from multiple application as another element holding back broader adoption.
But although most enterprises are not yet ready to deploy the technology, Ovum believes in time RTD will be a differentiator with the more successful deployments combining a workforce optimisation approach with full-scale enterprise data integration, including back-office tools, CRM systems, business intelligence, and customer analytics.
Customer care will also evolve into customer experience management, she says, using data from a wider pool of sources inside and outside the contact centre.
“The rationale for investing in RTD comes from a need to better understand and influence the customer experience across different touch points. Customers expect real-time updates online, and agents need to match and exceed customer knowledge. The barriers to adoption will be overcome rapidly as vendors realise they have an opportunity to capitalise on the need for real-time information within the enterprise.
“Ovum believes that enterprises should deploy RTD solutions to enable more accurate decision making for agents and easier access to information for customers. However, they should also set objectives and develop an investment roadmap to complete the missing pieces of an RTD solution based on their existing analytics capabilities,” concludes Brinsmead.
