While prediction is a game of hits and misses, spotting trends is as easy as ABC.
However, some pack a heftier punch than others.
The following five contact center trends have Tyson-esque power to shake up the industry – for better or worse – in 2024 and beyond.
1. The “Contact Center Agent” Definition Changes
Nowadays, not all contact center agents are shackled to the customer service department.
Store associates, field service workers, sales personnel, and various other employees often play the agent role and apply their skills across hand-picked contacts.
Metrigy cast a light on this trend in late 2023. It found that 47 percent of companies allow employees outside the contact center to support agents in solving issues.
Moreover, 30 percent of those businesses enable these employees to act as the agent “when needed” – interacting with customers directly.
As a result, customers get fast answers, and organizations may relieve pressure on their often attrition-riddled service operations.
The rise in UCaaS-CCaaS integrations has paved the way for this promising trend by allowing employees to interact with customers from a familiar interface.
Yet, it remains costly, as many contact center providers present a set price for every agent seat. As such, businesses sometimes pay $100+ each month for an external employee handling only a few contacts here and there.
Thankfully, some vendors are creating more flexible pricing programs. Zoom – for example – announced a three-tiered plan in December for its contact center customers.
With this, service teams can expand the agent definition, apply such a strategy more cost-effectively, and remove a big barrier to the informal contact center – or customer experience hub – of tomorrow.
2. Interoperability in Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) Increases
Zoom, Zendesk, Google, and many other contact center players added workforce engagement management suites (WEM) to their CCaaS offerings in 2023.
The trend reflects the evolution of hybrid and remote contact center strategies.
“Supervisors managed contact centers by walking around listening for audible cues of calls going awry,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, during an interview at Zoomtopia. “That didn’t change for decades.
“But, as soon as we went remote, we needed a new way to do it.
“The data and analytics from a platform like Zoom helps you manage people differently, learn their strengths, understand their weaknesses, and drive a better customer experience.”
Crucially, now WEM is part of Zoom’s unified platform, its customers may pool that all-important performance data and unlock new opportunities to improve various contact center outcomes.
Many of those opportunities stem from the interoperability within the WEM toolkit itself.
For instance, by blurring the lines between the workforce management and quality assurance solutions inside a WEM suite, contact center leaders may:
- Identify when agent performance typically dips to optimize break times
- Isolate the channel an agent performs best in and offer them more time there
- Spot whether an agent works best at-home or in-office to enhance hybrid work schedules
Moreover, agents may access these analytics too. As such, they can consider for themselves when they work best and defer the possible reasons. That’s empowerment – especially in operations where agents build their own schedules.
Yet, beyond WEM, there are many more chances to bolster performance. In the future, a contact center could utilize agent performance data across intents to power its routing engine.
The vendors that unify CCaaS and WEM on one platform will have a crucial advantage in bringing such possibilities to life.
3. Vendors Match Large Language Models (LLMs) to Contact Center GenAI Use Cases
In 2023, generative AI (GenAI) proved the most prominent contact center trend.
The rise of the technology brought many new opportunities for customer-facing automation, agent-assist, and the development of new contact center applications.
This year, new use cases will emerge from the woodwork. For instance, ChatGPT-4 now offers the ability to analyze and classify images, which opens the door for contact centers to automate more customer conversations.
ChatGPT and other LLMs bring many more possibilities. Yet, some are better at handling particular contact center use cases than others.
As such, contact centers risk frequent hallucinations when applying a less suitable LLM.
For this reason, many vendors now allow contact centers to attach their chosen LLM to power particular GenAI use cases in the contact center.
Sure, that’s a step forward. But, contact centers need more guidance to match the model to the use case – which is likely to be a significant focus for CCaaS vendors in 2024.
Zoom is already one step ahead with its federated AI approach that ranks various LLMs for different applications across its unified platform.
In doing so, the surging CCaaS provider offers its customers additional support when implementing GenAI, which is crucial as contact center leaders grapple with the vast potential of the technology.
4. Customer Experience Measurement Becomes More Prescriptive and Descriptive
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become an effective tool for marketing teams. Yet, service teams often despise the metric.
Why? Because while NPS may highlight a people, process, or technology issue, it offers little context of the underlying problem. Cue long, painful root-cause analysis projects.
Thankfully, new contact center reports are becoming increasingly prescriptive, aiming to provide clear, pertinent information that helps customers pinpoint their problems.
CRM leader Salesforce is at the forefront of this trend. At Dreamforce, it released a Customer Success Score that provides actionable guidance to businesses when implementing its Einstein 1 Platform.
In addition, it offers recommendations for improvements in solutions already rolled out.
Leveraging advanced AI and analytics, the Success Score addresses the gap between the reality of deployment and the picture of Nirvana vendors often love to paint.
Several CCaaS vendors have taken similar steps. For example, consider Zoom and its Virtual Agent.
“Customers were asking us: how do I know how much this is saving me?” admitted Ben Neo, Head of Contact Center and CX Sales for EMEA at Zoom, during a CX Today interview.
“So, we created savings reports throughout the conversational AI journey to justify the investment and help build a case for broader adoption.”
As brands put customer experience investments under the microscope against a tricky economic backdrop, such prescriptive and descriptive reporting becomes critical.
5. CCaaS Covid-Contracts Expire
Four years ago, COVID-19 ripped up the contact center playbook and thrust many unsuspecting contact centers into the world of CCaaS.
Many of those deals are now up for renewal, and many stalwart vendors are offering discounts left, right, and center to resecure the so-called COVID-contracts.
Yet, some will bear the cost of failing to ensure proper support services, enforcing inflexible pricing models, and – in some cases – attempting lock-ins.
Indeed, last year, Metrigy reported that 48.2 percent of businesses are considering shifting CCaaS platform providers.
Against this backdrop, many new-wave CCaaS vendors are enjoying early success in the space, expanding the competition and helping the industry move past those poor provider practices.
Zoom is again an excellent example, with 700+ CCaaS customers already – as it begins to skim the surface of its UCaaS base and bring its unified platform to the masses.
As such, it – like many others – will sense that those COVID-contracts are there for the taking.
Zoom Rides the Wave of These Contact Center Trends
With a unified platform, novel GenAI approach, and frenetic CCaaS innovation, Zoom finds itself at the cusp of each trend.
However, there’s much more that differentiates the Zoom Contact Center, including its native Virtual Agent solution, unique Contact Center Kiosk, and familiar agent interface.
All this signals a second Zoom boom, with CCaaS acting as the gunpowder and the match.
Eager to learn more about the Zoom Contact Center? If so, visit: https://zoom.us
