We know that the contact center solution ecosystem that customer service organizations use is made up lots of complex technologies, as highlighted in our  latest TechRadar™report. So how do you know what technologies are the right ones to invest in — the ones that will deliver real business value?

To figure this out, Forrester partnered with CustomerThink to survey customer service organizations to understand the adoption rate of 18 contact center technologies. We also looked at the business value that these technologies deliver as defined by three questions: 1) How critical is each to business success? 2) What is the technology’s market reputation for value? and 3) How difficult is it to implement and use? Here are our highlights, and you can find actual statistics in our report:

  • Solutions that focus on improving productivity have the most certain business value-add. Core contact center technologies enable agents to manage voice calls from customers via IVRs, log and manage inquiries via case management systems, provide standardized answers via knowledge management solutions, and manage the quality of service delivered via quality monitoring solutions. For enterprise customers, they can also optimize the scheduling of agent workforces. These solutions are mature, have a good market reputation among buyers, and continue to deliver significant business success.
  • Electronic communication channels also provide business value. Not all organizations deploy chat or email solutions; but for those that do, these channels are critical to their business success.
  • Social technologies have mixed reputation. Customer communities have excellent reputations, but are seen as moderately critical and moderately difficult to implement. Social listening technologies are seen as moderately critical, with low barriers to implementation, yet suffer from a mixed reputation for results. Social adapters, used to capture service inquiries from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, are still seen as optional, but have low barriers to implementation.
  • A set of unrelated, complex technologies have the most uncertainty. Speech analytics and virtual agents are viewed as optional in importance, difficult to implement, and offering low business value-add — relegating them to niche uses. Unified agent workspaces also are categorized as having uncertainty, primarily due to the fact that these applications have been mostly subsumed into more comprehensive solutions that involve guiding agents through service resolution process flows.

Are you investing in the right technologies to ensure that you are delivering a customer service experience in line with the expectations of your customers?