Page 41 - AIMA : Foundation Day Souvenir

next-best-action for agents, etc., all helped to improve the productivity of the call centers. While initially these automations were handled by the technology experts, today we see a multitude of Low Code No Code technologies available which allows the agents themselves to create such co-bots to aid them in their work dispensation.
As mentioned previously, a major stumbling block for moving call centers to low-cost countries is the diction, accent, and in the manner-of-speaking a language in a particular region or country. Today along with spelling and grammatical correction we get to see the instantaneous feedback on the tone of our response/message for written communication. This is especially useful for communicating via letters, emails, chats, etc. In the future, realtime voice synthesisation can be a solution where we auto-correct and auto-convert the voice of an agent, or even transliterate, to match the vernacular nuances of a country or region. Google’s Project Relate, focused on helping people with atypical speech to be better understood, can be extended to create such a solution. Similarly, UK’s Speechmatics claims to have done some stellar work in this area to recognize accented English. Think about, an agent in an outsourced country speaking in English with a particular accent that gets converted into not only a British or US accent but more specifically, into a Scottish or Yorkshire accent, all on the fly!
Customer expectations and preferences are however constantly shifting, which is one of the most difficult challenges in the support
and services industry. From instantaneous redressal of their complaints to one-of-a-kind tariff plans, customers nowadays demand more personalised services with immediate gratification.
While the present state of evolution and journey of contact centers have been outlined above, more exciting vistas are presenting themselves in the form of the metaverse, which perhaps will be able to bring about a completely new paradigm for contact centers. How will the metaverse aid us? In the new world where customers are largely managing their “ownthing” through self- serve. They will come to the contact center only for such activities which are non-routine and for which they have not been able to find the solution to their problem in the FAQs. This then presents the golden moment of truth to provide that differentiated empathetic service that will make them the organisation’s voluntary brand ambassadors. We know segmentation of customers is important and that is where the concept of avatars becomes important. We can think of creating personas or avatars of experts for each customer segment and curate the common issues or queries that they face and by leveraging virtual agents we try to provide that level of differentiated service in a 3D immersive way. Say, for example, you need to file an insurance claim for your damaged vehicle. You can use your portable device, which can be as simple as a mobile phone app, to converse with an agent and send the agent a 3D rendition of your damaged vehicle in real-time, discuss the damaged areas, which costs will be reimbursed, and which won’t, and get an instantaneous redressal. The options for leveraging the metaverse to provide such differentiated and hyper-personalized customer services are immense.
The metaverse is expected to have a profound impact on customer sales and services just as mobile phones did on the communications industry globally. Companies will perhaps set up virtual contact centers in the metaverse in the future, where customers will be able to connect with agents to take sales and service to the next level.
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