Forrester: "Customer service technologies are growing in importance"

The contact centre vendor space is changing so what should buyers look for when implementing a solution – and what are external factors such as social having on these technologies

In the fourth of her seven-part series into customer service technology, Forrester analyst Kate Leggett outlines the changing nature of the vendor landscape with many of the big players such as Nice Systems, Oracle, Salesforce.com and SAP buying smaller vendors to solidify their multichannel service offering.

“These acquisitions are happening because customer service leaders want a simpler, single-vendor technology solution to manage, instead of having to buy, integrate and manage disparate systems from a number of vendors,” she explained.

And having a core set of technologies are a must-have for contact centres that want to meet customers’ expectations at an affordable cost, Leggett added. “Core contact centre technologies enable agents to manage voice calls from customers, log and manage inquiries via case management systems, and manage and optimize agent workforces.”

Additionally, social technologies are becoming increasingly important as customers continue taking their service complaints to social media.

So implemented a technology that is integrated, and not siloed, in order to service customers across multiple channels is key.

“Customer service agents must often use multiple disconnected applications to resolve a single customer issue. In addition, service managers can't enforce a standardized discovery process across the apps, which hurts agent consistency and productivity, increases agent training time, and leads to a higher level of agent turnover due to frustration with the tool set.

“Customer service technologies that guide agents through process flows and deliver real-time guidance are growing in importance due to their ability to make agents more productive and their actions more consistent,” said Leggett.

In her previous blog posts on the customer service technology ecosystem, the Forrester analyst provided an overview, a review of the challenges caused by the complexity of this ecosystem and examined the tactical outcomes of poor customer service.