English
Steve Bederman:
For contact centers, 2020 was eventful and revolutionary. The earliest mindset of the industry was always to remain in its comfort zone but with the pandemic, they had to learn how to work from home and adopt new technologies. Today contact centers embraced change like never before and I think 2021 will be fantastic.
Bruce Belfiore:
How did the pandemic impact management outlooks in adopting new technologies, especially in regards to Omnichannel and Social Media?
Steve:
Our position in the market as a leader in both carrier and technology allows us to see the traffic that contacts centers generate. Usually, we see a couple of hundred million minutes every month but during March we observed a massive drop of 20% in that traffic. So we could observe how change was happening and most contact centers were thinking “How do we deal with this situation ?“
Steve Bederman was invited on the Benchmark Portal Podcast, moderated by Bruce Belfiore.
The discussion revolved around the coming year and the future evolutions of the contact center industry in terms of technology, ethos and ambitions.
Listen to the full episode here:
However, because they had technology similar to ours and they decided to send their agents home and start remote work. Six weeks after that initial drop, they began to recover but it was still 10% below normal.
Today we are back to having normal traffic for those contact centers. All they had to do is to use omnichannel technology. I think it says a lot about the scope of an omnichannel solutions and social medias. In a sense that contact centers are now saying that they should communicate how clients want to and not just by using voice.
Bruce:
Let’s talk about technology adoption in contact centers.
Steve:
I’ve been in this industry since 1990 and in doing that, the only thing that has been present in contact centers is the risk of adopting new technology. And even if there is visibility, it’s always an issue because they already have traffic and hundreds of thousands of agents for their business. So when a new technology comes into the market, it will always take 4 to 5 years before getting into the center of adoption.
We have been talking about Multichannel and Omnichannel for a long time. In fact during the period when multichannel was talked about. Which is a technology that manages multiples channels of communication but all separate from each other. Today it’s Omnichannel which takes all channels into one platform.
This change for the industry from MultiChannel to Omnichannel happened without that period of adoption. Especially in 2020 where literally a mass adoption happened for most contact centers because they had less traffic.
The pipeline is already full for 2021 and we are in the early stages of massive change. There are literally tens of thousands of contact centers beginning a new adoption process for the next 5 years.
If you want to learn more, you can listen to the whole interview at the top of the page.
