New Technology Innovations Emerging in the Call Center Marketplace

Technology seems to move at the speed of light these days, regardless of industry. Call center technology, for instance, has undergone so many changes in the past few years that it looks nothing like it did a decade ago. The technology itself is different – from the hardware to the software, and it’s only going to improve with time.

We know this statement as fact because we’ve seen it first-hand with our own cloud-based call center technology evolution, resulting in its current form as a call center and business intelligence solution. But we aren’t done innovating – and we certainly don’t plan to any time soon.

At TCN, we’ve added new features to our solution in recent months that correspond with larger call center trends and are working on a few others that we plan to roll out in the months to come to ensure that our customers are able to meet emerging customer needs.

Below, we cover some of the latest call center industry trends and how leading-edge cloud-based technology can help address customer needs and where the marketplace is headed, plus what current solutions can do for your business today.

Automation

The rumors of automation eliminating the human factor or stealing jobs are grossly exaggerated. Automation’s primary goal is to help call center agents perform their jobs better, usually by removing mundane tasks.

We call it “efficiency through automation.” By streamlining workflows and making information easy to access and find, call center employees are enabled to do the work they were hired to do: delight customers. And customers reap the benefits, too – when calling in, they’re more quickly routed to an agent who already has his or her account details at their fingertips and is better equipped to help them with a particular issue. Everyone wins!

While our call center technology was created with efficiency in mind, our VocalRx offering deserves special attention. The product is geared toward the healthcare industry and helps providers communicate with patients more often in an efficient and cost-effective manner. The suite of automated notification services can be used to facilitate appointment scheduling, check-in and check-out, customer satisfaction surveys, insurance claims and submission, patient collections, and even explanation of benefit (EOB) and payment posting.

The end result is a streamlined workload for call center agents—they don’t spend hours and hours tracking down patients—and a more positive patient experience. The technology can also reduce bad debt, another dimension of the “triple aim” of healthcare.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has become a trending topic across various industries of late, and consequently “buzzy,” but the conversation is necessary. Gallup has reported that employee engagement has a direct impact on business efficiency, productivity and profitability, and that impact is especially felt in the call center industry.

We sum up the data, news and blog posts this way: happy agents make for happy customers. By providing call center employees with the technology and tools they need, they are empowered to do their jobs.

Nowhere has this proven to be more the case than with VocalVision, our cloud-based call center technology optimized for the visually impaired. The software integrates with Job Access With Speech (JAWS), the world’s most popular screen reader developed for people whose vision loss that prevents them from seeing screen content or navigating with a mouse.

Providing the tool increases job satisfaction, as well as engagement. Employees with visual impairments discover they are as essential to the call center as their peers without sight impediments. They always were, but now they know and feel that truth.

Omni-channel

“Omni-channel” solutions have received a great deal of attention in industries like retail, banking and entertainment, but they show equal, if not more, promise in the call center. Thanks to technical advancements, contact centers are able to create customer records that encompass all communication channels, be they online chat, email, telephone or SMS.

The benefits are many, but they can be placed into two broad categories. The first is benefits for the agent. When they answer a customer, no matter the channel, they know exactly with whom they’re speaking and why.

This leads to the second category of benefits, which are for end users. They no longer have to share details they’ve already shared and bring agents up to speed on their account on each channel. They are known from the first interaction to the last. The entire experience is seamless and more or less free of frustration.

Those two areas of benefits translate into business results. Job performance and customer satisfaction metrics improve as agents reach customers whenever and wherever it’s convenient for them. And those metrics? They’re more often than not accompanied by positive developments for the bottom and top lines, too.

Call center technology is changing in light of larger digital trends and customer expectations. With better technology, call centers can increase efficiency, engage and empower employees, and deliver best-in-class customer experiences – which is where TCN concentrates its focus on innovation.

Learn more about TCN’s modern call center technology and how it can help your call center run more efficiently – check out the Top 10 List When Considering a Cloud-Based Contact Center Solution whitepaper.