Page 42 - AIMA : Foundation Day Souvenir

For contact centers, getting the right resources in a particular location has always been a real challenge. Thanks to digitisation, we have now more choices about how and where to provide the service from across the globe. But this is just the beginning of that journey. Eventually, digital interactions will be able to provide a much richer experience than just talking to some unknown call center agent. Today we can have live transcription which allows us to capture the conversations, search for the relevant topic across all knowledge bases in real-time to be able to respond appropriately to customers, and action items automatically and route them to appropriate teams using desktop-based automation. However, with metaverse, we may be able to do this by moving participants into a 3D space. We may create an avatar of ourselves which will be a digital representation of us, to connect with agents who will also be avatars of specialists in their respective fields, all in a virtual space that mimics the feeling of being together in real life. This feeling is often referred to as “presence,” and organisations are working actively in this space to create a digital world that both replicates and augments our physical reality. The term was coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson, an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.) Research and development in computer vision, display technology, audio, and sensors to capture facial expressions, eye movement, body language, touch and feel, are being experimented with. A key feature in the metaverse is the use of spatial audio, which makes speech sound like it’s coming from the direction of the person talking. All these will work together to bring to life the experience of “true presence”, so critical of customer experience management. This presence can provide a surrealistic experience that no voice call or even a video call can match: Picture a virtual setting where your car is being serviced in a garage and you can observe the work from your home while experts of the car company, who perhaps live in different locations, are brought in to a visualize a 3D model of the vehicle’s engine to understand why it’s making an abnormal noise. Or imagine you are entering a service center of yore trying to talk to a service engineer to explain your issue with your router
or mobile phone. In the virtual space, you’ll be able to interact and discuss the issue, perhaps use haptic devices to repair it also. (Like we have Alexa today in every home, maybe we will have robotic arms in every home of the future to do these kinds of work!) Similarly, for a utility company, it can be a meter reading which you are disputing on a bill versus what is displayed in the meter or for discussing the cost of a new connection where you need to estimate the line charges from the nearest pole, and you literally walk the talk and the estimate is done, instantaneously.
While many of these can be accomplished by our ever-evolving phones and tablets, the more advanced use cases will require either augmented reality (where a digital layer is superimposed on top of our physical environment) or virtual reality (which is a completely immersive experience). The hardware for these kinds of captures is in the works. We may have some virtual reality glasses and headsets and haptic devices to control our avatar, but more refined and less conspicuous tools will be required to create this kind of magical customer experience. For example, today there is hardware available that enables users to create high-fidelity virtual objects using their cameras to take photos from their standard-issue phones in a matter of minutes. These objects can then be transplanted into other virtual environments or overlayed into real environments for say, checking how a particular piece of furniture will look in your living room before you go and buy it online. Similarly, newer mobile phones now track 30,000 points on our faces via infrared sensors. While this is most commonly used for Face ID, it can now be connected to create (and stream) a real-time, high-fidelity avatar of a contact center agent who can virtually assist multiple customers at the same time, like we do chat services today. Long term, the goal is a light and comfortable device that you can wear at ease, switching between AR and VR whilst enabling natural interactions between yourself and other metaverse users. Developments in this space are happening at a rapid pace and AR headsets are beginning to look more and more like normal glasses. The much sleeker,
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