Today's Lifebuoy will be tomorrow's guarantee

The year 2020 will remain in everyone’s memory, and in the Customer Experience sector it will be remembered as the year of transformation, with a push towards what we foreseeing in the short/medium term and which COVID 19 has accelerated to the point of making it urgent.

In February, Adigital (Asociación Española de la Economía Digital) presented the report “España Nación Digital 2019”, in which it analyses the state of digitalization in Spain, with data that verified the fact that the country is still between the most advanced economies and those of a second level in terms of digitalization. That is, despite having all the advances necessary for the digital outbreak, the market still does not make actual use of those developments.

From my point of view, this theoretical presence of technology and digitalization of processes has been the lifeline for many companies with difficulties when the market was demanding urgent changes in Service and Customer Support, but I don’t think with this momentum things become stable. As in life, being constant and updated is the path to success, and there is no point in mending a flat tire and continuing the path without changing it. This action helps to reach the nearest garage and change the tire, to continue with strength and in sync, otherwise you will always have a weaker part of the car that will surely fail at any moment.

Fortunately, in recent times we have seen great changes in this sector where the help of Artificial Intelligence was beginning to appear in a very subtle way. Today, among other needs, COVID 19 has accelerated the need for new products based on this technology. The restrictions of a face‐to‐face channel and even its absence have saturated the voice channel, which has led to the urgency of downloading this channel through ASR assistants or Bots in web spaces. By offering companies the opportunity to continue their activity and to guarantee service to their customers. On the other hand, it is essential to highlight the importance it has had and the Cloud theme. It became clear that in the middle of the 19th century, working in the Cloud is not a choice, it is a reality. This facilitates the highly acclaimed telework, and allows the guarantee of
complying with the necessary standards of security and data protection even when working remotely.

Without going into the advantages that it opens to companies at an operational and development level. None of these trends is new, we have already closed 2019 with them but the circumstances have made them stronger and led to their actual and active search. We must not forget that transferring the operation to the Cloud and automating the processes with Artificial Intelligence, together with the Omnichannel capacity of the Solution, has been a real lifeline for Customer Service and Support at a time when telephone channels have been more saturated than normal. Now we just have to look to the future, stay with what guarantees us safety and protection because from unfortunate times we can only learn, overcome ourselves and grow.

* This article was written by Rui Marques for Libro Tendencias 2021 of AEERC * (Link to Libro)