The contact center has changed drastically in recent years.
Complex in-person offices brimming with constantly-ringing phones have been replaced BY global, distributed "customer experience" teams.
Moreover, new channels have emerged to help companies serve customers in an increasingly digital landscape, and innovations are appearing at record speed to boost customer satisfaction levels.
Now, heading into 2023, contact centers will entrench themselves further into innovation, adapting to customers' increasing demands while safeguarding employee experiences.
While it's impossible to know what customer experience might look like a few years from now, evaluating the latest statistics in the contact center space can give us an insight into where the landscape is heading.
Top Contact Center Statistics for 2023
In 2022, the term "transformation" remained at the forefront of the contact center vernacular, executing advanced hybrid strategies without compromising on personalized, convenient, and meaningful customer experiences.
As a result, more companies have adopted agile, efficient, and scalable cloud-based tools. Perhaps this is most evident in the growth of CCaaS, a market hurtling toward a projected $19.8BN valuation by 2031.
Many trends are driving this growth, some of which are evident in the statistics below, influencing contact center decision-making.
- Engagement Is Now Digital First: Since 2020, online interactions between companies and customers have accelerated. Around 57 percent of customers from all generations now prefer to engage companies through digital channels (Source: Salesforce)
- Three-Quarters of Contact Centers Are Already In the Cloud: The cloud allows contact centers to be more business-oriented and strategic. However, half of the respondents to a Calabrio survey say their current solution is limited and want to move to a more advanced service (Source: Calabrio)
- The Cloud Enables New Employee Engagement Innovation: Around 60 percent of contact centers believe the cloud has increased employee engagement and satisfaction in their organization. Additionally, 75 percent of companies that have migrated say they're more likely to trust new and innovative tools like AI. (Source: Calabrio)
- Replacing People With Bots Might Save Contact Centers $80 Billion: Gartner believes replacing people with AI chatbots could save the call center landscape up to $80 billion in staffing prices per year by 2026. By 2031, this number could increase to around $240 billion in savings each year. (Source: Gartner)
- Interaction Analytics Gains Ground: Around two-thirds of respondents in one survey said they believe interaction analytics to be "very exciting" for the contact center. Other exciting tools included predictive routing (56.5 percent), customer prediction models (52.7 percent), and insight generation (52.4 percent). (Source: Call Center Helper)
The Evolution of Customer Experience
When investing in new technologies, companies consistently say their main focus is boosting CX. As such, many contact centers have enjoyed budget rises.