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.