With so much change taking place over the last couple of years, it’s difficult to predict with any certainty what the future might hold for contact centres. Not so long ago, we probably wouldn’t have assumed the majority of contact centre agents would be working on a “hybrid” schedule or that self-service would have taken the world by storm.
While we can’t guarantee what the future might bring, we can use the trends we’ve seen in the contact centre throughout 2021 to explore what 2022 might have to offer.
CCaaS Adoption Continues to Accelerate
First, it’s almost a guarantee that the future of the contact centre will be cloud-based, flexible, and inherently scalable. On an astronomical scale, companies have discovered that the cloud is the key to business continuity, versatility, and continued growth. As of 2020, the CCaaS market was worth around $3.48 billion, but by 2028, Grandview Research predicts this number will increase to $10.8 billion – at a CAGR of 15.7%.
Not only does Contact Centre as a Service give contact centres the ability to serve a rapidly-growing hybrid workforce, but it paves the way for agile tech transformation too. As consumers continue to embrace new channels for communication, the CCaaS space will ensure brands can keep up with customer demands. There are even new forms of CCaaS solutions emerging on the market to suit new needs, including tools that combine both UCaaS and CCaaS environments.
Agent Experience and Hybrid Teams
For years, the battle cry of the contact centre has been “customer experience”. However, throughout the pandemic, many companies began to discover just how much CX is influenced by the employee experience. In the age of hybrid, distributed teams, it’s essential for every employee to feel connected, empowered, and informed.
A poor agent experience in the new contact centre will lead to distributed, disconnected employees, unable to provide consumers with contextual, consistent conversations.
Companies will need to ensure they’re building their flexible CCaaS environment around a focus on agent and employee experience. This means prioritising everything from ease-of-use to a convenient, all-in-one environment for interactions. For many companies, this trend is even prompting the rise of Microsoft Teams contact centres, where agents and employees can access excellent tools for collaboration in an aligned digital environment.
Self Service Grows More Essential
The concept of self-service isn’t new in the contact centre, but it is becoming more critical, as consumers expect convenient digital solutions. After all, according to Zendesk research, 67% of customers say they prefer self-service to speaking to a company representative. To enable this future of self-service, contact centres will need to feature advanced chatbots, IVRs, and virtual assistants, capable of responding to a host of customer questions.
Crucially, as customers adapt to the new digital landscape, and engage in more interactions online, self-service solutions need to be as intuitive as possible. Frustrating, repetitive chatbots will not be an option for excellent CX. Companies will need to implement tools capable of leveraging CRM data for personalization, and advanced AI to make interactions feel as human as possible. Companies will need to partner with the right contact center vendors to build state-of-the-art, branded systems.
Customers Demand Hyper-Personalized Interactions
Countless studies in the last couple of years have revealed customer expectations are rising. Despite a problematic couple of years, clients have witnessed countless major brands pulling out all the stops to continue giving them a convenient, consistent experience across a host of channels. Today’s customers hold every business to the same standards as the market leaders, meaning smaller companies can’t get away with sub-standard experiences.
Perhaps the best way to deliver on customer expectations is to learn more about them. The good news for today’s business owners is we have endless access to data to help us track, assess, and transform the customer journey. Analytics tools, CRM integrations, and other services built into the contact centre will allow us to track the end-to-end consumer journey. Effective tracking should make it easier to design better, hyper-personalized interactions for customers going forward.
Immersive Customer Experiences
Finally, the way companies interact with customers seems to be changing on a phenomenal scale. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen several different channels appearing in the contact centre, from SMS and social media messaging, to dedicated bots on company websites. Some vendors are even beginning to implement more video into the customer experience. We know video tools can help to bring staff face-to-face to add context to conversations – so why not use the same tools for consumer interactions too?
Video could be just the first step for a lot of companies. Indeed, some brands are also beginning to experiment with extended reality too. As virtual reality headsets become more accessible, and augmented reality applications grow more common, XR is an incredible opportunity for customer engagement. Even leading businesses like Microsoft are getting involved, creating mixed reality opportunities to connect people like never before.
In the years ahead, we could see a lot more contact centres providers bringing multiple realities into the interactions brands have with their consumers.
What’s Next for Contact Centres In 2022?
As mentioned above, it’s difficult to know for certain what kind of challenges and opportunities might emerge in 2022 and beyond. One thing we can see in all of the trends mentioned above, however, is that the contact centre landscape is moving at an incredible rate. Vendors are innovating like never before in the face of an evolving environment for brand and consumer interactions. Who knows what the future could bring?
