Ram Ramachandran, Senior Vice President and Head, Middle East & Africa at Tech Mahindra highlights the new set of technologies going to impact the outsourcing industry and lists the tech trends beyond AI and ML that will serve the building blocks for call center ecosystem
The Call Center and outsourcing industry across verticals in the Middle East is undergoing a paradigm shift. While focus on core business and cost reduction have always been the core pillars for outsourcing objectives, new parameters are adding to the mix specially post the COVID-19 impact. These include improved speed to market, catalyzing IT innovations, scalability and flexibility coupled with access to new technologies. This also ensures a seamless transition to “Work from Anywhere” or “Gig Model” of operations that envisages the next wave of working across global BPOs.
The Middle East’s fast-growing tech economy hopes for lower unemployment and higher living standards. AI and machine learning (ML) innovation plays a significant part in this dynamism. For example, according to a new report by Google and The Economist, AI technologies could provide economic growth to the tune of $320 billion by 2030 to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. AI enabling improvements such as automating processing and services would lead to such growth.
With increase in automation and AI adoption, it is a common occurrence for anxiety to induce in workers. Boston Consulting Group surveyed workers around the world on how they feel about automation. In the UAE, 37 percent of workers say they perceive automation as a risk factor, while about a third of all workers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt are of the same opinion.
On the other hand, multiple research firms are still trying to determine the answer to a crucial question –
Will automation will lead to an increase in jobs?
Economists have commissioned two papers on automation and its effect on employment. The first theses forecasts automation will make firms more efficient and reduce the number of employees. Then came a correction of sorts, with a wave of reassurances minimizing their negative impacts.
The second thesis states automation will lead to an overall increase in jobs. Importantly, this does not limit to skilled workers in fields like engineering or programming – but jobs at all levels. Based on what we know today; the evidence goes more strongly toward the second thesis – a position supported by the pandemic experience.
AI and modern BPOs – enhancing customer experience:
85% of companies believe AI is beneficial, however only 20% percent have successfully incorporated AI into their businesses. It is mainstay that most modern contact center technologies have AI embedded. However, the key to success is the ability to harness customer information to identify what, when and how customers expect. The implementation of these requirements across people, process and technology is critical to enhance the customer experience.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered technologies come in all sizes and shapes, from Enterprise Grid software to open-source ones. This brings in light an essential question; which technology is the best? This divergent question is much more complex than a straightforward answer. However, in my view the short answer is not “All or One”, instead it is “Some”.
While human agents will continue to remain the main pillar of any call center, the “Some” part of technology is not a one size fit all but something that is built on the latest technology principals by which we abide across our Tech Mahindra BPS framework CX.NXT.
The forthcoming trends listed below serve as the building blocks for any call center ecosystem to withstand the upcoming wave of digitization among BPOs:
- Omnichannel is a Must– Customers should have the freedom to select their choice of communication medium while ensuring the consistency in brand messaging. Introducing new channels is now expanding beyond script based chat bots and we are seeing advent of conversational BOTs via Amazon Alexa or Apple’s Siri.
- Hyper Automation for Frictionless Operations – Before wanting to adopt the next best tech, most organizations can get benefit upwards of 20-30% in their cost of operation reduction just by ensuring all customer service-related departments are seamlessly talking to each other. Right from telephony platforms to CRMs and ERPs, it is not always the customer facing agents responsible to drive best CX KPIs. Both the customers and employees can be empowered by right level of process automation using unattended BOTs and Orchestrators for Scheduling.
- Leverage Big Data via Predictive and Speech Analytics – Analytics in call center is moving beyond the basic Dashboard Analysis that gives a daily rundown of KPIs team wise on a given operations floor. It is about the ability to use the Omnichannel big data to run predictive models to gauge next call reason, best time to call, repeat call prediction, attrition prediction and customer churn prediction. This is layered with live speech and sentiment analysis of an ongoing customer call so that the right interventions can be brought in as and when needed.
- Gamified Learning and Training for Self-paced upskilling –While human interaction in training is always needed, the digital training ecosystem ensures personalized tests and scoring along with a feedback mechanism for continual improvement. This helps arrest attrition that is a rampant challenge in any call center along with helping develop talent that can act as a super-agent across all channels of customer interaction.
- Cost Center to Revenue Center – A call center is not a department to keep frustrated customers at bay, rather it is a place to get to know the true pulse of your brand in the market and proactively resolve customer challenges. This outlook coupled with all the data that an enterprise has, can help us drive the needed brand campaigns to upsell/cross-sell across customer segments.
In summary, contact centers need to balance the use of new age self-serve technologies with personalization that only humans can bring. 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. 74% of customers are more loyal to a company if they can speak with a human being, and 58% of customers believe that talking to an agent will allow them to get the best and most efficient service.
