42% of customers complain about long waiting times when calling the contact centre and 40% of company representatives expect quick wins from automation of routine questions. It was interesting to see this fact confirmed again by a wide margin ahead of other options during the last webinar held by Spitch and PwC. During the first webinar with BearingPoint for the German-speaking audience, even more people (70% and 50% respectively) shared this opinion.

Despite this difference, Spitch and thought leaders from BearingPoint and PwC agree that the general trend is clear. We can say that today the contact centres of companies in different countries face largely the same serious challenges. They need to implement quick changes in order to maintain customer loyalty and successfully grow their business.

The webinar showed that customers are also concerned about boring identification questions (21%), using cumbersome DTMF/touch-tone (17%) and being transferred to another agent/system (29%).

The same trend can be observed in the attitude towards adopting new value-adding technologies: 25% of respondents believe that intent recognition-based routing (smart IVR) will help change the situation for the better (63% – during the first webinar). The same stands true for the automatic voice verification/identification (38% and 25% respectively). However, almost twice as many respondents in the German-speaking audience see quick wins in speech analytics (31%, compared to 15% in the English-speaking audience). Voice-driven self-services for routine questions have been selected by 40% (50% – during the first webinar). Considering that only 6% of the German-speaking audience and 10% of the English-speaking one expect quick wins for contact centres in “other” technological domains, it is evident that voice solutions are viewed as one of the main sources of positive change in the near future.

The Spitch team together with experts from PwC and BearingPoint helped participants find well-informed answers to questions on how to improve the effectiveness of the contact centre through digitalization, which technologies are more effective for automating key processes, and what needs to be done to make sure that the challenges for the contact centre do not create risks for the entire business of the company.