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It happens to the best of us. As we vet options, we become enamored by the bells and whistles and cool functionality that a technology product can deliver.

Then, we go through implementation, roll out the new technology to our teams so we can achieve our primary goal for the new technology, yet somehow settle with using a just fraction of the functionality we were sold.

Getting more out of your technology isn't just a matter of ROI, it's also a great way to stay innovative, develop new efficiencies, and stay ahead of the game. Here are a few ways you can get more out of your existing tools:

What problems will the technology solve? What new problems will it introduce? How will the new technology impact our customers? Do our customers even care?Before investing in new technology, consider this pragmatic approach.

Are you clear on the problem the new technology will solve?

If you do not already have a sense of your contact center’s “opportunities”, dig into your data. Without a clearly defined problem, you will not have a strong solution.

Adding new technology to an ambiguous situation causes chaos and could lead to a failed implementation.

The phone will no longer be the dominant channel for contact centers.It’s already happening.

Text and social media are more widely used than phones by Millennials, and many have an aversion to speaking on the phone. It wouldn’t be shocking to see chat and text explode in usage across many contact centers in the next three to five years.

If given the option of voice or anything else, most customers (and even agents) would choose anything else. Expect to see more contact centers prioritize social media support as core to their business model.

For many, social media has become a daily source of communication and news. Businesses desperate to win the war for attention will continue to invest heavily in social over other traditional means of advertising.

With that increased investment, customers will expect that these same organizations will have a support presence in social media.

The channels will multiply exponentially for many contact center teams, and there will be specialists in user-generated content and social media skills. Contact centers unable to adapt and leverage social channels effectively will run the risk of being out of touch with their customers.

Contact center will ensure that agent experience is more front and center.

We are in a period of tremendous evolution. While most research and efforts have focused almost exclusively on wowing customers and delivering outstanding experiences, the war for talent will require companies and contact centers to adapt.

Between side hustles and the gig economy, there will continue to be more options out there for job seekers to consider. Contact center leaders that allow team members to have flexibility, growth and development opportunities, as well as a culture that people want to be part of, will win.

Mergers and acquisitions across major contact center technology players.

From a technology perspective, the industry may become even further dominated by larger players. Expect to see major players merging and acquiring niche technology solutions to remain both competitive and control all levels of the channel experience.

There will be a land grab to plant the flag first in new technology frontiers. For example, remote support will have a more significant role in the next three to five years.

Expect to see continued investment in self-service efforts, as organizations will continue to embrace artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence will become table stakes for any contact center in the next three to five years. With increased pressure both inside and outside of the contact center, leaders will be focused even more on deflection efforts.

Contact centers will need to have an AI strategy in place that, at a minimum, deflects more straightforward interactions easily by offering up FAQs, YouTube videos, or support content via bots. After all, the best service is often no service at all.

The nature of customer experience changes quickly. At the rate that technology is preventing consumerism, it is only a matter of time before AI and automation become a natural part of all contact centers.

The role of artificial intelligence should be to make customer-company interactions more convenient, efficient, and less prone to error. Artificial intelligence is making leaps and bounds, and as more companies begin to implement it within their contact centers.

Computers cannot think. But increasingly, they can do things only humans were able to do. It is now possible to automate tasks that require human perceptual skills, such as recognizing handwriting or identifying faces, and those that require cognitive skills, such as planning, reasoning from partial or uncertain information, and learning.

“Technologies able to perform tasks such as these, traditionally assumed to require human intelligence, are known as cognitive technologies.”

Cognitive technologies have been evolving over decades. Businesses are taking a new look at them because some have improved dramatically in recent years, with impressive gains in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, among other areas.

Because cognitive technologies extend the power of information technology to tasks traditionally performed by humans, they have the potential to enable organizations to break prevailing tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality.

We found that applications of cognitive technologies fall into three main categories: product, process, or insight.

• Product applications embed the technology in a product or service to provide end-customer benefits.
• Process applications embed the technology in an organization’s workflow to automate or improve operations.
• Insight applications use cognitive technologies—specifically advanced analytical capabilities such as machine learning—to uncover insights that can inform operational and strategic decisions across an organization.

Each of the type is further discussed below.

Product
Organizations can now embed cognitive technologies to increase the value of their products or services by making them more effective, convenient, safer, faster, distinctive, or otherwise more valuable.

Not only can cognitive technologies be used to enhance products and services, they can also bring about entirely new classes of products and services that can create new markets and generate large gains for inventors.

Process: Automating internal processes with cognitive technologies

Another category of cognitive technology application is automation. By automation we mean using computer systems to do work that people used to do. The result is that the work gets done faster, cheaper, better, or some combination of the three.

Some applications of cognitive technologies eliminate jobs by taking on all of a worker’s responsibilities. Automated voice response systems that replace human customer service agents for first-tier customer support are well established.

Cognitive technologies are not the solution to every problem. Organizations need to evaluate the business case for investing in this technology in an individualized way. Organizations should look across their business processes, their products, and their markets to examine where the use of cognitive technologies may be viable, where it could be valuable, and where it may even be vital.

Insight: Cognitive technologies learning from information

The third category of cognitive technology application is creating insight. Natural language processing techniques, for instance, make it possible to analyze large volumes of unstructured textual information that has not yielded to other techniques. Machine learning can draw conclusions from large, complex data sets and help make high-quality predictions from operational data. Many companies are using cognitive technologies to generate insights that can help reduce costs, improve efficiency, increase revenues, improve effectiveness, or enhance customer service.

Never underestimate the importance of your IVR. It is often said that good service starts at the front door. Just like a good hotel, where the doorman greets you and the whole experience is set by the ambiance of the lobby and the welcome received, for call centers, the IVR is a crucial doorway to your company. The way it greets your customers and directs them often dictates the impressions customers have about the service they will receive. When IVR messages are long and tedious, customers may rethink the value of their relationship with you and look for alternatives.

IVR’s represent a complex integration of processes and technologies that include call routing, prompts, voice talent and more. Each of these must be put under the microscope to optimize the total functionality of the IVR and initiate the best customer service experience possible.

Not every contact center has a frustrating call flow design; however, many do confuse and confound customers, which contributes to a growing dislike of IVR’s. The challenge of creating an effective and user-friendly IVR requires a seamless blend of technology with the need for simplified human interaction.

Our experts suggest that following one Golden Rule will help to eliminate a large majority of design issues. This rule states “Each customer, reaching each menu, should easily find one, but only one logical choice for them.” In addition to the Golden Rule, it would benefit IVR design teams to give consideration to the following:

What are the needs of the customers accessing the IVR?

What are the demographics of the customers?

Have you avoided jargon used by the company that may be foreign to the customer?

Do you have multi-language options? Could you incorporate speech recognition?

Speech recognition technology is one of the most widely deployed technologies used, and one of the most identifiable to the customer. It’s use of simple phrases and stated numbers makes it easy for people to get it right the first time. Moreover, speech recognition works especially well with customers who are mobile – who represent a growing percentage of those reaching contact centers. People on the go have a harder time punching in numbers and therefore speech recognition offers the ease of conducting business using their voices. Speech recognition also can reduce menu options. When properly designed and implemented, tools like speech recognition enable companies to change business process easily and quickly, thus making the IVR more
efficient and cost effective.

To understand the efficiency of an IVR system, identifying the right metrics to track is essential. Our experts agree that Transfer Rate is perhaps the single and most valuable metric for measuring IVR efficiency. The IVR is designed to route calls of specific types to specific agent groups; therefore, by tracking the number of transfers that agents do in order to get the call to the correct location for issue resolution provides an indication of design flaws within the IVR. The second metric is the average time it takes to navigate through the IVR.
For those looking for best practices in IVR design, our experts suggest:

Establish a strategy: understand what the IVR is supposed to accomplish;

Create an IVR team comprised of people from IT and your business units so that both sides of the equation are addressed;

At the customer interface, keep the IVR as simple as possible;

Track Transfers, the time to navigate the system, rates of IVR abandonment, and the rate that people opt out of the IVR to speak to a live agent;

Use satisfaction surveys to gain feedback on its usability; and,
Consider its design from the user aspect.

Don’t let your IVR drive people away from your business. When properly designed, the IVR can be efficient for the company and effective for the customer. The overall process seems simple, but IVR design often requires some intensive tweaking to get it right for you, and to get it right for the customer.