According to a Statista 2022 report, companies plan to invest more in contact center operations to:
- Improve CX (85 percent)
- Deliver a better quality of service (78 percent)
- Grow their business (56 percent)
- Keep pace with the competition (34 percent)
Yet, where are companies investing their time and resources? Within these seven trends lie some significant clues.
1. Cloud Migration
Cloud-based contact centers are essential to support remote and hybrid workforces. They provide robust features and functionalities from any location, and cloud architecture simplifies integration with third-party services.
However, companies with heavily customized on-premise solutions cling to these as they once provided the secret sauce to differentiated CX. Therefore, a slow-burn digital decoupling approach will likely stay on the agenda for many large organizations.
2. Incorporating Conversational AI
Chatbots are not new to contact centers and often answer repetitive customer queries based on business rules and conversational workflows.
The earlier generation of chatbots could handle simple interactions within a predefined range of rules, while the next generation is growing ever more advanced.
Using natural language understanding (NLU) to learn from every user interaction and navigate increasingly complex conversations, conversational AI can help when:
- Managing people, documents, and expenses in the contact center
- Supporting and onboarding customers
- Nurturing and lead generation through website chatbots
- Recruiting, screening, and training contact center agents
3. Integration of Speech Recognition
Speech interfaces like Siri and Alexa are evolving, with many companies integrating speech recognition with interactive voice response (IVR) to automate simple tasks. As a result, customers can engage with voicebots through these speech assistants and solve their queries without lifting a finger.
These technologies can also help to streamline particular parts of customer interactions, such as identity authentication, which strengthens security.
In addition, as voice search becomes a critical touchpoint in customer interactions, online helpdesks and FAQs must adopt speech recognition capabilities to provide customers with self-service.
4. Self-Service Options Soar
Flexible self-service eases the burden on contact centers and empowers customers to find and implement support at their convenience.
Over time, self-service technologies will evolve to include a variety of options like:
- Cognitive search – Provides helpdesk visitors with answers beyond the knowledge base
- Intuitive chatbots – Directs app and website visitors to the correct information or redirects them to a human agent
- Community support – A forum that provides customers with peer-generated content
5. Real-Time Insights and Analytics
Contact centers can use real-time data analytics to identify issues and make crucial decisions that help accelerate their business growth.
It is essential to assess agent performance to understand the root cause of issues, discover what customers want, and provide better service.
Also, analytics can improve decision-making in core areas like uncovering intent, gauging real-time agent performance, and bringing about immediate improvements.
Finally, supervisors and agents can leverage dynamic data dashboards to view customer sentiment and predict the best way to resolve an issue.
6. AI-Based Sentiment Analysis
Chatbots, voicebots, and real-time speech recognition can collect data about each customer interaction and measure customer sentiment.
The engine leverages AI algorithms to identify keywords, phrases, and stress levels to arrive at an accurate understanding of the customer’s sentiment in real-time. Here is how it works:
- Customer raises support ticket – Customer raises support requests via communication channels like email, chat, or social media.
- Artificial Intelligence analyzes text expressions – The algorithm for sentiment analysis attempts to capture insights to determine customers’ emotions.
- Business rules are activated based on customer sentiments – Business rules such as chat routing, adding tags, or setting priority are initiated based upon the analysis of customer sentiment.
- Personalized, context-based support – Call center representatives can understand the emotions of customers and offer support in an empathic manner to improve their service experience.
In 2022, many companies will implement a CRM with embedded sentiment analytics so the contact center can measure how customers feel after every interaction. Such information adds depth to customer retention projects and proactive, personalized messaging.
7. Co-Browsing to Quicken Contacts
Co-browsing or collaborative browsing allows customer support agents to remotely control a customer’s browser and help resolve their problems in real-time.
By temporarily guiding the customer through tasks like making online payments, filling out forms, making a warranty request, and so on, co-browsing streamlines contacts. What’s more, co-browsing can significantly improve first call resolution (FCR) rates for contact centers.
Future Directions
Two overarching forces will drive the seven trends discussed: the use of data-driven platforms and CCaaS as the dominant technology architecture.
According to Gartner, CCaaS helps consolidate multichannel interactions and drive self-service while ensuring a cohesive customer journey. CCaaS will also allow contact center teams to tap into new and powerful data sources that reveal critical insights on the customer.
Discover the leading CCaaS platforms for businesses by reading our coverage of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS 2021
