The retail trade sector faces one of its greatest challenges in its history: to manage the complexity of interactions in a global and multidispositive environment within its contact centers. With channels that range from email and voice to social networks and instant messaging, companies must guarantee rapid, efficient and scalable attention, anywhere in the world where they operate and even during seasonal sales, such as Black Friday or Christmas, which multiply the complexity with demand peaks that can bend or even triple the usual volume.
“The great variety of contact points and the challenge of managing interactions in different languages, time slots and platforms, among other things, involve a great logistics and technological challenge for customer service centers,” says José Enrique Garcés, director of the Retail Division of Arbentia.
Technology as a pillar of transformation
Omnicanal management platforms, combined with tools based on artificial intelligence, have proven to be key to transforming traditional calls into modern and flexible care centers. In this context, Arbentia has identified the six most outstanding technological trends:
- Omnicanal integration: The possibility of centralizing all customer interactions (social networks, chats, email, voice, etc.) on a single platform allows contact centers efficiently managing large volumes of consultations. In addition, automatic routing ensures that each application reaches the most appropriate agent based on their language, specialization or availability. Likewise, advanced systems allow prioritizing the most urgent cases and establishing service level agreements (SLA) that guarantee optimal response times, thus reducing customer frustration.
- Automation by bots: The incorporation of chatbots, enhanced by AI, in customer service centers is revolutionizing the way to serve the client. During high demand periods, such as Black Friday, these solutions are able to manage up to 80% of consultations without human intervention, greatly reducing operational costs and improving response times.
- AI for interactions analysis: Artificial intelligence also plays a crucial role when analyzing real -time conversations, generating automatic summaries and providing insights about the level of customer satisfaction. This capacity allows to adjust processes and detect improvement areas continuously. Interactions analysis also allows detecting customers at risk of abandonment, identifying signs of dissatisfaction or lack of engagement and activating retention strategies, such as personalized discounts or priority assistance.
6 technological keys that are revolutionizing the contact center in the retail thanks to the AI
- Training and adaptability: Rotation in customer service equipment, especially in seasonal peaks, requires intuitive and easy -to -use tools that minimize learning curves. These platforms also include knowledge bases with content adapted to each country and regulation, assisting agents in real time. In addition, some systems can generate automated training manuals and customize onboarding processes according to the profile of the agent or the region in which it operates.
- Scalability and flexibility: Current systems allow to adjust technological resources automatically, ensuring that contact center infrastructure can withstand drastic increases in demand without interruptions. In addition, they facilitate the incorporation of new channels and capabilities without the need for additional licenses. This flexibility also extends to the generation of reports in real time, which allows companies to continually evaluate the quality of care and ensure regulatory compliance in different markets.
- Smart orchestration between AI and human attention: An effective contact center must automate processes and guarantee a balanced integration between technology and human assistance. The CCAAS platforms (Contact Center as Service) play a key role in allowing both automated and assisted interactions by agents, through digital and voice channels. In addition, having clear policies of trust and regulatory compliance in the use of AI is essential to guarantee customer safety and privacy, avoiding answers not aligned with the brand’s identity. On the other hand, the flexibility and scalability of these platforms allow to centralize knowledge in a single environment, reducing the impact of the rotation of agents and simplifying the operations so that the equipment can focus on the improvement of the customer experience (CX).
