A new year, a new vision for your contact centre?
As 2024 begins, one thing is for certain: putting brilliant customer communication first is likely to pay dividends.
Here, Matt Yates, Vice President of Engineering at leading CCaaS platform provider MaxContact, hits the ground running with predictions for the coming year – and key advice on how to make it slicker and smarter than ever before…
Artificial Intelligence
Chatbots have been around for years, but most people would agree that 2023 was AI’s big breakthrough year. No prizes, then, for guessing that 2024 will see even greater deployment by businesses of all sizes and in all sectors. Sure, there was a lot of hype around ChatGPT, but get ready to reap the serious benefits of real-time speech analytics and conversational AI. Enhanced accessibility to these game-changing solutions will transform contact centre quality assurance processes; giving brands new levels of insight into how they are interacting with their customers and, importantly, how to make those interactions better. Technologies like real-time call transcription that provide agents with on-screen prompts to help them progress a customer conversation are already here, but 2024 will see them deployed much more widely. Similarly, AI-powered augmented document look-up, synthesized voice digital assistants, and more customer self-service tools will save agents valuable time and provide faster, more satisfying outcomes for customers. Post-call summary notes will take 30-40 seconds to produce rather than several minutes, reducing agent workload and improving well-being. Agent coaching, too, will be improved; driving up performance and helping to recruit and retain the best talent. Of course, all businesses will be on their own particular AI maturity curve, and it will continue to be vital for them to go at a pace that is right for them. For our reseller partners, the potential benefits of helping their customers on that journey are huge, and we’re looking forward to supporting them in every way.
Integration
2024 will see a continued increase in the cloud-based unification and centralization of core contact centre functionality. Dialer management systems, Customer Relationship Management systems, Speech analytics tools, Unified Communications as a Service platforms – they have all brought value to the contact centre during 2023 but this year businesses will take the next step of bringing them all together. No more agent swivel-chairing between multiple systems, no more wasted time or unnecessary process replication, and no more frustrated customers who now expect a seamless experience whenever they interact. Towards the end of 2023, we saw an increase in the number of requests for the incorporation of a CCaaS solution into an existing CRM, removing the need for agents to log in as the CCaaS solution intelligently links and powers interactions directly from the CRM. The dialer and the digital omnichannel functionality is all managed via a CCaaS back end that integrates seamlessly into a well-established CRM which everyone is familiar with and which provides the business with that classic single pane of glass visibility. 2024 will see more of that consolidation and simplification. Great news for businesses, and great news for customers.
Personalisation
2024 is set to be a year in which customers crave an altogether more personalised communication experience. AI-powered solutions will be smarter at customising content, targeting audiences, and leveraging customers’ omnichannel communication preferences. Of course, budgets will influence the sophistication and scale of deployment, but for an increasing number of businesses, any element of automized personalisation is likely to add significant value. Of course, the economic landscape will play a huge part in how fast and how far businesses will go, but it’s highly likely that every contact centre, no matter its size, will take advantage of some kind of customised automation. Consumers have become increasingly used to being communicated with in a more personalised way and do not want to receive content that is unsolicited or not relevant to them. The smarter businesses will understand that and invest in the technologies and the service providers that help them respond accordingly.
Regulation
Most people think that having rules around the use of AI is a good thing, and that it is inevitable. Will formal regulation occur in 2024? Maybe not, but the evolution and voluntary adoption of widely-accepted guidelines is likely. Contact Centre technology providers must watch this space carefully and be prepared to act in order to serve their customers effectively. Data security legislation, GDPR, and legal compliance with myriad different regulations such as the Consumer Duty Act has and will continue to help protect brands and consumers, and anything that the contact centre industry can do to reinforce that protection must be encouraged. MaxContact customers and partners understandably look to us to be across all of these important issues and to provide guidance on the crucial business of Payment Card Industry Compliance, for example. We will certainly continue to do much more of that this year.
Conclusion
There is much innovation and customer communication enhancement to look forward in the coming year, with AI playing a major part in how contact centres continue to evolve. However, success is also always about relationships – and this year will be no different. At MaxContact, we take huge pride in having strong relationships with all our customers, partners and stakeholders. We have always gone out of our way to meet on a regular basis: not just account managers, but software engineers and support staff too. For us in 2024, that will continue to be a huge focus. It’s important because we build our own CCaaS solution in-house, which means we have to be truly understanding of the end user and their needs. We believe our whole team should be out there visiting clients, seeing how agents are using the product every single day and how it is enabling them to provide a better customer experience. So, for us, 2024 will bring more customer engagement and more customer empathy. It’s all about helping our customers get the very most they can from their CCaaS investment whilst we ourselves continue to innovate and grow. All in all, it’s set to be a fantastically busy and exciting 2024 for MaxContact and our customers – so Happy New Year!
To learn more about how MaxContact can support your contact centres’ growth in 2024, visit its website
