Driven by the impact of COVID-19, 2020 has been a year of dramatic change for the contact centre. We’ve seen the kind of evolution that you might expect to happen gradually over five years compressed into five months, as companies were forced to embrace remote working for the majority of their workforce overnight.

2021 will see businesses coming to terms with turning interim remote working tools into longer-term solutions that will support a new form of business as usual. Something that some are calling the ‘new normal’.

This will mean moving from the initial patchwork of methods used to deliver remote working to a more solid, enterprise-level and cloud-based strategy that fills in any gaps and enables expansion. At the same time, organisations will need to meet the changing needs of both customers and agents moving forward.

Here are five key trends for 2021 that your company should be watching:

1. Mental Health and Well-Being Prioritised

Remote working can take its toll on the wellbeing of contact centre agents as they are away from face-to-face support given by colleagues and supervisors. The situation is made worse as callers are often more demanding and assertive as they try to deal with their own pressures from the pandemic.

All this means that supporting the mental health of agents is likely to be a major priority next year. Technologies such as real-time speech analytics can help by tracking and measuring the emotion in agent-customer interactions and allowing supervisors to better understand stress levels and intervene where necessary.

Of course, mental health is about much more than technology and companies will have to review and adapt their working culture and processes to ensure they can support a fully remote or hybrid remote working model.

2. Company Security and Compliance Reinforcement

With most people remote working, maintaining data security and compliance becomes much more difficult. We will see a bigger focus on getting this right in 2021.

Security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, and hackers and fraudsters often see inexperienced homeworkers as a prime target. Agents need to be aware of the dangers and ensure security is as tight in their remote working set up as when they are in the office.

Businesses must reiterate that the same processes around confidentiality and security. Contact centre agents will need to be even more vigilant about protecting access to their devices and ensuring password security if they are working from home.

Additional rules should be established to protect the privacy of both personal information of customers and the agents themselves. Such as making sure that customer calls cannot be overheard and that agents switch off their cameras when talking to consumers.

3. Cloud Technologies for the Contact Centre

The sudden acceleration of remote working due to the pandemic has forced contact centres to embrace the cloud. However many enforced interim solutions either didn’t cover every part of the functionality required or had to be manually stitched together, which impacted productivity and agility.

Trends for 2021 include the need to plan for the longer-term which not only includes ensuring more complete cloud solutions are in place, but also implementing the concept of the connected enterprise. This is where experts and specialists in IT, service and social media, to name just three examples, can be added to a customer conversation when required.

One trend we can expect to see is increased uptake of cloud-based back-office collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams in the contact centre. There are advanced solutions from contact centre technology vendors that now integrate closely with Microsoft Teams and enable businesses to take (and route) calls seamlessly, record interactions, monitor for quality and performance and scale to meet changing needs.

Integrating the contact centre into Microsoft Teams, allows front office agents to handle calls more effectively. Seamlessly engaging with back (or middle) office experts who often have the information required to help customers with complex or specialist enquiries.

4. Video is Going to Become More Prevalent

In 2021 we’re likely to see further growth in video within contact centres. Video will play a central part in in a wide variety of applications. From collaboration, remote team meetings and staff training to social group video calls for supporting staff well-being and team bonding.

Expect to also see greater use of video calls with customers as this supports more engaging interactions. It is particularly helpful for demonstrations and ‘how-to’ explanations such as when an agent in a retailer needs to demonstrate the benefits of a particular product or a field engineer needs to explain how to complete a minor repair or reboot.

Explainer videos for FAQs are increasingly being posted on company websites and social media platforms to help reduce incoming calls to technical specialists.

5. Voice of the Customer will Determine Strategy

Businesses have always recognised the important role that the Voice of the Customer (VoC) plays in creating a customer-centric strategy. The pandemic has made VoC even more important in driving quality customer experiences and it is sure to be one of the key trends for 2021.

The key is to ensure you are collecting VoC data from multiple channels and using the insights to understand changing customer needs. Adapting how you operate and innovate as a result of the data. You must be agile in changing times to meet customer requirements.

Think Long Term

Overall, we all hope that 2021 will be less traumatic than 2020. The key to success is for businesses to take stock of all the changes that have happened and focus on ensuring that any short-term solutions put in place due to the pandemic are fit-for-purpose for the long term.

Only then will they be able to deliver the high-quality, innovative experiences and levels of service through the contact centre that consumers demand moving forward.

Discover how we can modernise your contact centre and customer interaction experience. Discover our solutions now.

Discover our Contact Centre Solutions

This post originally appeared on enghouseinteractive.com at blog.enghouseinteractive.com/5-key-contact-centre-predictions-for-2021/