The terms “CX” (Customer Experience) and “contact centre” go hand-in-hand. Though there are many factors that can influence your customer’s perception of your brand, few are more important than the contact centre.
The right contact centre environment acts as the essential connection point between you and your clients. It’s how you reach out to sales prospects and deliver the service that makes customers want to stick with your brand.
Today, customer experience is one of the most important areas for any business to focus on if they want to ensure longevity. Companies in the US alone risk losing around $494 billion in revenue as a result of poor customer care. Elsewhere in the world, the losses can be just as dramatic. Unfortunately, figuring out how to consistently delight your audience isn’t always easy.
In the age of digital transformation, users expect more than ever from the companies they work with. Survival in this landscape demands rapid investment in the right technology, processes, and people. Let’s explore the evolution of CX in the current contact centre market.
The Trends Driving The Evolution of CX: AI in the Contact Centre
The way companies approach customer experience is being influenced significantly by the rise of technology, and the digital transformation of the contact centre. According to Gartner, by the end of 2022, CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) will already be the preferred model for 50% of all contact centres. Technology in the cloud can adapt more flexibly to an environment where customer preferences and trends are changing every day.
In this newly flexible cloud environment, different companies will take different routes towards amazing customer experience for their audience. One of the most important trends influencing the transformation of the contact centre right now is AI.
AI is becoming increasingly important in all parts of the communication landscape, but it may be particularly essential in the contact centre. Intelligent tools can deliver a number of benefits to the contact centre environment, including:
- Improved employee performance: Real-time assistants and bots in the contact centre can enable and empower modern employees. These tools can help to improve business efficiency by intelligently routing the right customer to the agent with the correct skills. The same solutions are excellent for instantly delivering contextual customer information from integrated tools in the contact centre, so employees can access information immediately.
- Better personalisation for customers: AI can offer suggestions and best-practice guidance to employees to help them deliver more relevant, personalised experiences for customers. The right tool could pull up CRM information for your agents when they’re in a conversation. These solutions can even track things like the sentiment in human voices, to determine when a conversation is going poorly.
- Automation and efficiency: AI can record information quickly and safely when necessary, to reduce the manual work an employee needs to do in the contact centre. There’s also the option to implement self-service bots and tools capable of answering customer questions too. This not only gives customers more options for how they get service, but it also reduces the amount of work human staff needs to do
Artificial intelligence in the contact centre has the power to enable everything from improved self-service opportunities to better team productivity. As CCaaS continues to evolve, AI is also becoming much easier to access for companies of all sizes.
Omni-Channel Experiences: More than Just Audio
The transformation of CX in the contact centre is also prompting companies to look beyond the basics of audio and phone calls for serving customers. Increasingly, omni-channel contact centre technology is becoming a must-have for businesses of all sizes. Today’s teams are accessing everything from SMS to WhatsApp and web-based chatbots to serve customers. Over 40% of customers choose olive chat over social media and email for company communication, and live chat also has the highest customer satisfaction rate, at 73%.
The right omnichannel environment can connect all of the different communication pathways in a brand’s CX strategy and provide a single pane of glass for tracking information. This allows for a much better view of the customer journey. Speaking of the customer journey, platform centralisation and alignment in the contact centre also allows for deeper insights and better business decisions.
A single integrated CX platform combines behaviour, data, and marketing from all platforms, so companies can see which channels their customers are using the most, where they need to change their scheduling strategy, and how they can remove friction from complex parts of the customer journey. Increasingly, CCaaS solutions are growing more flexible, offering deep integrations with everything from CRM tools to quality management systems, so end-to-end analysis can be as accurate as possible.