The Frictionless Future of the Contact Centre

After working with software-based contact centres for over 20 years, SAP Digital Interconnect has seen many rounds of product evolution towards the present flagship SAP Contact Center 365 public cloud offering. 

I spoke to Markku Helin, Chief Product Owner for contact centre at SAP Digital Interconnect, who explained that in 2020, the contact centre will be a business-critical system at the heart of customer experience. No matter what business you are in: “If your customer service is not able to pick up the phone or respond to chat conversations, it’s the same as if you closed all your shops. So, it’s essential to provide a reliable and robust service.”  

Always on: 24/7–365 

Customers today expect the same instant response and seamless experience, whether they engage via a phone call or over one of the many conversational messaging channels which continue to emerge. 

Markku Helin

To support this, you need a solution like SAP Contact Center 365 that provides agent tools to handle omnichannel interactions, preferably also with the ability to switch or enrich the channel during the customer interaction. For example, customer starts with a chat bot, but the chat dialogue is then transferred and connected to a live agent. While discussing with the customer, the service rep can then enrich the text-based interaction with voice or video and link the interaction with customer data or any service or sales process residing in an integrated, for example, CRM system. This will help your service reps to deliver personalized experience with real-time insights to customer details.  

As Pekka Porkka, Head of the Contact Centre Development Unit at SAP Digital Interconnect, explained: “The problem is not what is the dominant channel in the market, it’s about businesses needing to support the channels of customer choice. This means that you need to support all of them — including email, webchat, and in some countries even fax! And increasingly, our customers have demand for WhatsApp, WeChat, and other conversational messaging channels.” This has created problems for many organisations with systems that are not truly omni-channel. Continuing to build an omni-channel experience based on point solutions is and will continue to be difficult and complex. It will also add to cost of development and maintenance of these systems while there will be limited value added to the customer experience itself. This is because you will surely have many channels, but very likely not the omni-channel experience. 

Logically centralised, physically distributed 

A contact centre with a unified routing engine for all customer interactions not only creates an omni-channel customer experience, but it also reduces operational costs by eliminating obsolete systems infrastructure, integration points, and IT support expenses.  

If it isn’t yet, your contact centre will become a vital part of your business intelligence command centre with its rich customer data and analytics capabilities. The insights about your customers bring you new opportunities for brand specific customisation. Also, the historical data about your customer interactions allows you to automate most of your routine queries while your customer service reps have time to specialise in the more complex customer issues. Finally, with the modern tooling your service organization can leverage the expertise across front- and back-office independent of where the expertise or individual experts are located. The so–called physically distributed – logically centralized service model has the entire organization equipped and incentivised to contribute to the customer experience and drive customer satisfaction, even when working from home. 

As Helin explained, “We helped one customer, selling high-end luxury goods, to optimise their call centre around customer satisfaction. So they were keen to eliminate the time spent in an IVR interaction, and wanted to apply more human agent resources to support their demanding customers, to match their brand expectation. 

“However, another type of contact centre might be optimised around cost and efficiency. Same tool, but very different type of

Pekka Porkka

configuration. Most important in the deployment projects is that customer knows how they want to drive their customer service” 

As the old saying goes, you can have it the fastest or the cheapest or the best — but you can’t have all 3. What you need, in order to make an informed decision, is the data from all channels, in real time, and that means measuring the right things in the first place.   

It’s good to learn from SAP’s experience that with all the automation efforts, human interaction still has a place in the customer service mix – also in the strategic deployment of an advanced call centre solution. And when that solution is equipped with true omni-channel customer engagement, the future looks very exciting. 

Learn more about SAP Contact Center 365.