My entire career has been in high tech marketing with the past twenty-plus years in marketing contact center solutions. And to tell you that things have changed in this industry is an understatement. Look at any tech out there. Yes, phones used to be tethered to the wall, and when your phone rang, you had to answer it to see who was calling. In fact, the land line was your only connection to your friends and family, and everyone in the house rushed to answer it just to see who it was. No need to tell you where we are now—it’s pretty cool to think about how far we’ve come.

Over the years, the contact center industry has seen tons of changes along with tech that does amazing things to help you get the best customer service possible from the companies with whom you do business. As you have heard over and over lately, great customer service is not a “nice to have” any more, it is imperative to the very survival of your business.

Enter, the bots—those cool bits of helpful contact center tech that proactively engage with your customers to answer questions without human interaction. Quick aside here (remember, I am in the contact center industry). Quite a few years back, I was browsing a web site looking for a specific clothing item, and a bot popped up asking if it could help me. This totally freaked me out! Are they watching me? How do they know what I am looking for? I quickly clicked the button to close it. It just weirded me out. I found what I was looking for, called the company, waited in the queue, talked with an agent, and placed my order. When I look back on this experience, the bot should have told me, “Don’t worry! We’re just trying to help you.” Fast forward a bit. Now, I look for the bots popping up asking if they can help me or I click on the button to chat with someone. It’s so convenient, and I don’t have to look up a phone number and wait in a queue to talk with someone. I just bypass the queue and get right to ordering or asking questions about a product or service.

Bot technology is just one of the many advances that we’ve seen in the contact center that’s designed to help provide great customer service. And it can make agents’ lives easier and more interesting by handling simple transactional interactions and leaving the more complex ones to the humans.

So, what’s the next leading-edge technology coming down the road that will fundamentally change the customer and employee experience? That’s the overarching topic that we’ll dive into with you at our live ICMI video discussion, Putting Technology to Work for Your Customers and Your Employees, on April 27, 2022 from 10:30 to 11:30am EDT.

Please join me, Peter Milligan, Director of CCaaS Product Marketing, and my colleague, Jessica Smith, Senior Manager CCaaS Product Marketing, on the 27th for a lively discussion. To participate, gather up your ideas and experiences of how you have implemented technology in your contact center to benefit your customers and employees and save your seat today. Jessica and I have some interesting industry angles and thoughts on contact center technology to share with you, and we look forward to hearing yours!

If you haven't yet purchased your pass, we’ve got you. Use promo “8x8” and get a free conference attendee pass here.