Revealed: Top 5 Jobs for the Contact Center of the Future

Recruiting for customer service used to be really simple: someone calls, they talk to an agent, they get an answer. This requires a fairly narrow skill set. But times have changed.

Today, consumers expect increasingly faster customer support, through a variety of contact channels. Consider this recent Forrester report showing a clear shift in preference toward digital communication. In the last three years, customers have increased their use of self service by 12 percent, live chat by 24 percent and customer communities by 25 percent.

This shift means companies will have to improve the service they provide through these channels and others, such as social media and mobile. And that will require drawing from a more diverse talent pool.

Software Advice, a website that publishes help desk software reviews, rallied some of the biggest names in staffing--including Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Randstad USA and SimplyHired--to help envision how these changes will impact customer service hiring. Their experts looked into their recruiting crystal ball and imagined companies asking to fill these positions in the future.

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Self-Service Content Optimizer

The individual in this role would straddle what are traditionally customer service and marketing functions. Their goals would be: (1) To deflect tickets from the call center by driving more traffic to the self-service center, (2) To drive greater customer retention and loyalty by creating a thriving community of brand advocates.

Recently, I hosted a discussion about how customer service is becoming an increasingly important marketing differentiator, as consumers become disenchanted with traditional marketing. The Self-Service Content Strategist would be in charge of steering inter-departmental alignment. Creating and managing helpful content is the centerpiece of this process.

This person would use analytics to find the most trafficked topics and write new material around the most popular topics. They would also moderate content created by the customer community and facilitate the sharing of this user-generated material.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Writer

All of the greatest content in the world is meaningless if the customer can’t find it--fast. This person would design the complicated algorithms behind search functions on the website, knowledge bases, and even with speech recognition for the phone system. They would also constantly analyze query success rates to see areas where more improvement is needed, or perhaps work with the content developer to create new articles for queries that don't find an answer.

While most companies will deploy off-the-shelf or open-source NLP technology, the NLP Writer will need to make substantial configurations to apply it to their company’s specific use cases and content. Consider the difference, for example, between the following two questions that both need the same answer:

• Where is the power button on my new headset?
• How do I turn on a handsfree calling device?

Social Service Success Czar

Increasingly, customers expect to use social media for support. And when they do, they want an answer within two hours. The Social Service Coordinator would ensure efficiency in this social customer service response by optimizing social listening technology. These systems require users to specify keyword identifiers for finding customer service messages, plus writing rules that prioritize these messages in the ticketing queue. This person would be responsible for constantly refining these specifications.

If the contact center suddenly gets an influx of calls about a particular product, for example, the coordinator would want to start listening for combinations of that word such as "help," "broken," "angry" and so on.

Mobile Customer Service App-timizer

Customers don't want to call you, they'd rather just find the answer themselves online. They also, increasingly only use their mobile device for such browsing, which can be frustrating on a tiny smartphone or tablet keyboard. To address this customer desire and avoid this annoyance, companies are increasingly designing support-specific mobile applications.

Consider these companies use of voice to improve the mobile customer service experience. The mobile customer service app-timizer would work with developers to consistently improve such applications. If analytics showed one feature is used more than another, for example, they might try featuring it more prominently on the app home screen. Or maybe they’d work with the NLP Developer to refine speech recognition for that function.

Virtual Customer Service Representative (CSR) Manager

The benefits to employing virtual CSRs are clear. Reports show these workers are less stressed, improve retention and cost less.

The Virtual CSR Manager would provide tools and services for enabling remote work, as well as consistently comb key performance metrics to identify weak spots. Finally, they would keep a pool of virtual contact agents available, so during times of peak calls they could quickly scale up the call center.

Ashley Verrill is currently a CRM market analyst for SoftwareAdvice, where she blogs regularly on customer service.