How the Internet of Things is Changing the Contact Center
Digital transformation is an inevitable journey for every company. It represents a profound transformation of business, organizational activities, process and services to leverage the opportunities modern technology brings. Broadly, digital transformation also allows brands to prioritize projects that would impact end customers—indeed, even society at large—faster than they’re doing it now.
Transformation efforts include focused Proofs of Concept (PoC) around emerging technology, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality (AR) to affect client and customer experience. With experts predicting around 20 billion to 50 billion connected things by 2020, companies must accelerate their digital transformation or risk going out of business. They should start by reimagining the way they deliver services to connected customers.
Smart Everything
Perhaps the most common IoT application is tracking physical assets and their usage, particularly the assets’ per-use charge. Organizations can analyze IoT data and move toward predictive maintenance. The next big step would be for brands across a range of industries to use IoT in serving customers better.
Industries have already connected things that would have seemed unlikely, if not impossible, a few years ago. Notable examples include smart health care, smart cities, smart workers smart home and even smart farming. This has added incredible new value.
In a smart farming example, a business partner could help a fertilizer company create a better experience for farmers. How? The partner’s agents realize that the typical farmer’s key challenge is ensuring they have the right information to improve their yield. The agents can then add value for our fertilizer clients by solving their customers’ challenges. Let’s examine two critical areas: soil monitoring and smart irrigation.
Soil monitoring. Most knowledge of soil is based on measurements taken from samples at selected times of the year, or from analyzing soil in laboratories. But a better way is to apply sensors that measure soil moisture, nutrients, fertility and water availability in real time. This means a farmer can develop custom fertilizer profiles and determine the best times to plant and harvest. The sensors can also alert farmers to irregular conditions such as high acidity.
Smart irrigation. Automation can reduce water usage by tracking how much water is needed in different parts of a field. IoT-connected sensors can tell an irrigation system exactly how much water to use and where. Farmers can also see detailed irrigation maps and automatically apply the right amount of water to different parts of the same field.
PoC Pitfalls and Success
Transformation based on the IoT is exciting, but we must also understand the common pitfalls from various PoC initiatives focused on the IoT. In early 2017, for example, Cisco surveyed* over 1,800 business and IT leaders in the U.S., the UK and India across a range of industries. The idea was to learn key IoT project adoption challenges.
The survey revealed that 60% of projects stall in PoC because they lack collaboration between IT and the rest of the business. The paper also emphasized engaging the IoT partner ecosystem (including business service partners) at every stage, implying that strong partnerships throughout the process can smooth out the learning curve.
An important ingredient for successful IoT transformations continues to be a solid understanding of how to innovate through pilot projects, instead of investing millions of dollars towards the transformation all at once. Moreover, businesses should select the right use case, start small and expand from there.
For example, an effective use case would be Remote Health Monitoring and Telehealth. With a general shift of care in hospitals moving towards a private environment, this becomes very compelling. As new technologies get piloted, however, we cannot ignore the need for human intervention to ensure successful change management. The transformation journey must also include your service provider, who should be engaged and current with the pace of technological change.
Contact Centers and IoT Strategy
An economy driven by customer experience depends upon how well you have understood and can identify opportunities and bring value to an end customer. A successful IoT implementation features the human factor as a critical ingredient of success. That translates into giving your customers a better, more personalized experience.
- Customer profiling. With an extended IoT ecosystem, companies are gathering more real-time data about customer behaviors and preferences. That gives rise to the question, “How well are you augmenting real-time data with existing information to better understand your customers’ preferences?”
- Intelligent and non-intrusive conversations. Would your customers prefer a non-intrusive channel beyond voice or emails, such as a short message service (SMS) bot? Such bots can help customers make better maintenance decisions. For example, IoT data and predictive modeling can tell you your refrigerator filter is about to expire and suggest a good price on a replacement filter. A simple, intelligent SMS bot can provide a non-intrusive channel that proposes a solution and asks the customer if he or she would like to be reminded in a few days.
- Enter Millennials. Beyond just the IoT data you would collect and the analytics you apply, you would want to ensure you’re bringing the latest technology to deliver the optimal experience. Fully 80% of Millennials want to escalate issues to a call center only if they can’t solve a problem on their own. This opens the door for a channel to see how they can solve issues with a changing customer self-service model. By creating a near real-time experience, augmented reality and virtual reality would be a differentiator in resolving issues quickly.
Stay Relevant
Companies going through digital transformation need to identify and prioritize initiatives or projects that keep them relevant. By focusing on emerging technologies, they can accelerate the shift. Working with the right customer experience management partner can help digital transformation go smoothly.
By Cereen Varghese, Sr. Director IT
*http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=1847422
