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CAPTURE SOFTWARE

CAPTURE 2.0 OPPORTUNITIES IN CONTACT CENTERS

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Capture 2.0 involves the real time understanding of various forms of digital content, whether it be documents, images, voice or video. This understanding is needed for automation of customer contact centers. Capture 2.0 technologies can keep agents better-informed, aid in the automation of the user experience. Customer satisfaction is key and the customer expects fast, well-informed systems that satisfy the underlying reason for their contact.

HSA had the opportunity to attend Call Center Week in Las Vegas, NV, June 17th & 18th with the objective of further exploring opportunities and potential partnerships for our clients in this market. This trade show is organized by IPQC. Call Center Week is one of the largest in the US with over 2,000 participants and competes with International Customer Management Institute (ICMI). In the US there are also a number of vertical market specific contact center trade shows, including SpeechTek, which although focusing on speech related automation technologies has renamed and positioned itself as a “Customer Service Experience” show.

At Call Center Week there was a large array of 200+ vendors represented in the Expo Hall: contact center service providers, platform providers, technology providers and other industry suppliers. SAP, Genesys, SalesForce, CDW, LinguaSys, and Kodak Alaris were on the exhibit floor as well as many other Call Center focused solution providers.

Although Contact Centers have been around for many years and are automated, the provision of services are very much in a state of change and in the early stages of advanced Capture 2.0 intelligent understanding; we believe that this market can make more extensive use document and data understanding technology that has been developed by capture software vendors.

Even though each phone contact can cost in the area of US$4.50 to $11.50 compared to approximately $0.50 for an automated contact, the technology to automate contact center processes still has quite a ways to go. IVR workflow systems have not replaced human contact; language translation, for the most part, still needs a third party translator involved; and knowledge workers are still manually reviewing and responding to detailed emails.

The contact center industry presents an interesting opportunity for case management capture. There is a need to interpret, understand and route key information to achieve a successful and satisfying customer experience, which is key to this market, which is continuing to evolve from Voice to Multichannel input to OmniChannel understanding. There are opportunities to extend technology utilized in document understanding and classification to the contact center industry. This can be in support of cloud platforms (eg. SalesForce) or on premise (eg. SAP).

From Multichannel to OmniChannel

The term Multichannel has been used in the contact center market for over 10 years. The ability to communicate with a customer through whatever channel they chose has been a highlight of conversation in the industry. The ideal interaction allows the customer to communicate via phone, email, post, and more recently text and social media, whichever they prefer even within one the customer contact event. 86% of contact centers are Multichannel enabled. There is an issue with Multichannel communications. Although the customer can communicate with the Call Center via multiple channels the communication has tended to be siloed. Many systems are not integrated and do not have enough intelligence to bring all the relevant customer information into the process. This is changing.

The focus of the next phase of automation is on OmniChannel communication, where the customer can communicate through many channels. Contact center systems will be able to tag, track and make decisions based on input from these channels. The goal of the OmniChannel contact center is to have all past and present customer interactions and relevant information available to the customer service system at the time of the interaction. Integration of all communication types via all channels is critical to improving the customer experience and this is where the key opportunity for capture technology lies.

Telephone Contact Still Reigns, for Now

In the traditional multichannel world the telephone is still the predominant communication device and voice recognition is a key technology. In all, over 60% of customer contact currently comes through voice communication and it will continue to be important (though ‘millenials’ are heavy text users.) According to ICMI 45% of consumers will abandon an online transaction (and switch to voice) if their questions or concerns are not addressed quickly. But as mobile phones displace landlines, the telephone utilized is a smart phone, which expands OmniChannel communication capability.
There was a heavy presence of Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) vendors. Visual IVR is being promoted with the use of keypads on the smart phone or computer is used for navigation. The preference of the majority of customers is to speak to a live person. The key to automation is to maintain the customer experience in the most natural way possible, route the call efficiently, and when necessary, route to a “live person” based on the nature of the call or sentiment of the customer.

Conclusion

The contact center industry presents an interesting opportunity for case management Capture 2.0 solutions. There is a need to interpret, understand and route key information to achieve a successful and satisfying customer experience, which is key to this market, which is continuing to evolve from Voice to Multichannel input to OmniChannel understanding. There are opportunities to extend technology utilized in document understanding and classification to the contact center industry. This can be in support of cloud platforms (eg. SalesForce) or on premise (eg. SAP).

Mike Spang – Vice President, Research, HSA Inc.

About HSA, Inc. (Harvey Spencer Associates):
Since 1989, HSA, Inc. based in New York (US tel: 1+ 631.368.8393) has been specializing in electronic information (image based and electronic transaction) capture technologies. Our services include Market Analysis, Technology Planning Assistance, Product Positioning, Product Management, Client Sponsored Research and Strategic Planning Services. These products include high-speed document scanning hardware, image acquisition software, character recognition software (OCR, ICR), optical mark recognition, barcode recognition and other pattern recognition and classification tools.

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