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.