What is Smart Tech: between Contact Centre and Customer Experience, how technology helps companies

What is Smart Tech: Between Customer Operations and Control Room Smart Tech is an injection of omnichannel and automation within the remote support universe. Until a few years ago, BPO was mainly divided into two areas: Customer Operations and Control Rooms. Customer Operations (contact centres) had to be responsive and accommodating, because they were primarily concerned with acquisition and retention or business development. The Control Rooms (NOC, TOC, SOC), targeting a universe of technical functions (installers, maintenance engineers, IT directors), had proactivity as their main objective. In Technology Operations (control room), it was not so much the communication skills that mattered, but the competence of an operator to remotely guide a customer towards the resolution of a potentially 'blocking' instance. With the advent of Digital Transformation, the spread of 'BtoBtoC' and IoT, the two worlds have started to come closer together, thus opening up new reflections on the skills needed to preside over them appropriately, also in function of increasingly innovative relational touch points. From Control Rooms to Smart-Tech services: the evolution and what has changed In today's BPO landscape, distinctions are increasingly blurred. Contact centres no longer speak only to the end user and control rooms no longer interact…

What is Smart Tech: Between Customer Operations and Control Room

Smart Tech is an injection of omnichannel and automation within the remote support universe. Until a few years ago, BPO was mainly divided into two areas: Customer Operations and Control Rooms.

Customer Operations (contact centres) had to be responsive and accommodating, because they were primarily concerned with acquisition and retention or business development. The Control Rooms (NOC, TOC, SOC), targeting a universe of technical functions (installers, maintenance engineers, IT directors), had proactivity as their main objective.

In Technology Operations (control room), it was not so much the communication skills that mattered, but the competence of an operator to remotely guide a customer towards the resolution of a potentially ‘blocking’ instance. With the advent of Digital Transformation, the spread of ‘BtoBtoC’ and IoT, the two worlds have started to come closer together, thus opening up new reflections on the skills needed to preside over them appropriately, also in function of increasingly innovative relational touch points.

From Control Rooms to Smart-Tech services: the evolution and what has changed

In today’s BPO landscape, distinctions are increasingly blurred. Contact centres no longer speak only to the end user and control rooms no longer interact only with technicians. Smart tech is the marriage of the two worlds’, both enriched with new specialisations.

The user, in this context, can be anyone: a consumer, a distributor, an installer, a maintenance technician, a company. Thanks to automations and omnichannelity, support becomes proactive for everyone: a ‘connected’ car can signal that it will have a problem in a defined number of kilometres and, therefore, a smart tech division can provide support to both a driver and a dealer.

In other words, interventions will be increasingly oriented towards trouble-shooting and it will no longer be so necessary for them to be managed entirely by human operators, as an automatic workflow will be able to guarantee, in whole or in part, increasingly smart management.

What are the benefits of Smart Tech? Developments for a company

Thanks to artificial intelligence technical interventions can also be carried out with the help of automated processes, at the command of which the human being remains in any case, who will contribute that value that the machine cannot provide: human warmth.

A voice bot can manage the first part of an assistance process through predefined questions, recognise both the user and their answers, and manage an initial trouble-shooting assistance process very quickly, as it can receive messages, photos, etc.

If necessary, the request can in any case be physically dispatched to an operator who will then already have all the information well organised to add value to the report and also make UP or Cross Sell, if appropriate. The machine makes it possible to free humans from repetitive actions and to harness those skills for more valuable activities.

Smart Tech in the service of the customer: an example of application

Marco has installed a photovoltaic system, but realises that it is not generating energy and calls for assistance. An installer came to Marco’s house and tried to get in touch with the inverter manufacturer.

Customer and installer are together and call the Control Room. The operators are all busy, but an automated system recognises, thanks to a PIN, that the caller is an authorised installer and therefore initiates an initial automated trouble-shooting process.

If the questions do not allow the expert to be guided towards an immediate resolution of the problem, the system directs the technician to a human operator, who, in the meantime, will have freed himself and will have already viewed the transcript of the interaction that took place with the voice bot, and will therefore not need to repeat again what was already said or done during the first part of the interaction.

Where is Smart Tech going? Trends in the near future

The goal is to make artificial intelligenceand omnichannelalitybring more value to human activity.. The most successful companies will be those that better integrate automation, touch points and valuable educational processes to support the human operator, in an increasingly proactive, H24 and multilingual perspective.