2020 has just begun, and from the microcosm of customer service we are trying to intercept the most relevant trends that companies will focus on (or should do …). If you deal with customer service, and you want to know where to direct your investments and your efforts, this is the right article for you.

Conversational Business Process Management – BOT and Visual IVR

In 2019 the BOTs finally proved their worth. Ok, not always, but more and more often they have become synonymous with economic savings, digitization and improvement of the customer experience. This is the trend that interests us.

Certainly the real value in a successful BOT is the ability to better manage a process, which is why the solutions that will be considered of value in 2020 will be “Conversational BPM”, that is systems on which to map a process managed in a conversational. The ability to trigger events, query back ends and manage information is essential to create services that are truly capable of downloading human work by automating activities.

Cloud Contact Center Maturity

The speed of execution is one of the most successful drivers of a company. Being able to prototype and implement new services in a very short time is a huge differential in terms of business. The cloud greatly facilitates this speed, and is finally spreading to the world of the contact center in a significant way. The legitimate fears related to security issues can today be easily managed especially if the service is provided by a cloud provider and not by a vertical technology provider. Thanks to a cloud contact center technology, construction times are reduced by orders of magnitude, there is no longer talk of updating projects and working with a cloud provider in addition to the call center, you can access many other services (database, storage and applications natively integrated), quickly creating services of great value.

Whatsapp

Surely the advent of services that allow you to communicate with customer service using an APP or a portal have helped to move a good volume of contacts that were managed by voice to digital. But the volumes of these channels rarely exceed 20% of the total. With the launch of WhatsApp as a customer service channel, these percentages will be quickly reduced. WhatsApp for its diffusion and for the time of use (14 h / month on average for each of the 35 million users in Italy alone) is a real killer application that promises to finally move significant volumes. It is unthinkable to manage this channel without decoupling, automation or pre-qualification BOT processes, but it is certainly an indispensable channel for modern customer service. And soon the launch of WhatsApp Pay …

Conversational Commerce

The phenomenon of the transition of contact centers from cost centers to profit centers has been ongoing for years, with a further acceleration arising from the digital shift of many sales processes. Conversational commerce is a rapidly spreading mechanism that moves sales processes to a conversational model. The key components are very simple and do not involve technological changes, but are more linked to integration aspects (in particular with payment and warehouse systems) and process. Access a customer service via whatsapp, discover that our need is manageable by activating a small contract upgrade and immediately give the ok, engage customers from advertising banners and bring them directly to contact with a sales agent or use an online catalog integrated with a BOT to support the customer in the choice and purchase are just some of the achievable examples.

BOTs to support agents

For years we have been hearing about Knowledge Base and agent support tools. But the reality is that except in extremely simple actions, these tools rarely demonstrate a return on investment in line with expectations. The BOTs used as a knowledge base are simpler and can in some cases become proactive, intercepting a need and proposing (and sometimes executing) an action. If during a conversation with a customer, for example, I intercept his financing need, the BOT could analyze the client’s assets profile in real time, suggesting it to the agent or coloring the conversation green or red depending on the profile. Or, in the face of a problem on a customer’s modem, the BOT could remotely reset or analyze the line