From AI and self-service to omnichannel support, these are the changes driving the customer service industry forward.
More and more businesses are opting for multi-facet contact centers to offer a better customer experience.
So, what is a contact center? Offering omnichannel customer support, these centers are designed to connect with customers using today’s many different touchpoints. A range of contact center technologies are used to manage everything from calls and chat to email, website support and social media.
Not only does this new technology empower customers with self-service options, such as chatbots, freeing up call agents, it also allows contact centers to track data more effectively. Greater insights into customer behavior can be gleaned from interactions and data, which can help to support sales teams and marketing campaigns, as well as customer service team training.
Contact centers often use cloud solutions for greater adaptability and scalability. They ensure that resources can be accessed from anywhere in the world at any time, rather than being restricted to one physical location.
Artificial intelligence is also an increasingly significant feature of the customer service experience as it offers new ways to collect and harness customer data and insights, support the work of human agents and provides self-service for independent customers.
The global call center AI market is projected to reach $7.5 billion by 2030. As we look to the future, digitalization is also on the agenda. In total, 85 per cent of companies have the aim of expanding their digital channels as we move towards 2025.
What technical skills do call centers need?
Increasing digitalization in contact and call centers has expanded the range of technical skills that businesses require from their staff. It’s likely that contact center agents will be assessed on their computer skills, their experience in resolving issues over the phone and other support channels, their understanding of data insight and analysis, task prioritization and communication skills.
An effective contact center agent will need to have empathy and an ability to connect with customers while approaching problems as a challenge to be solved. The ability to be flexible and resilient is valuable in this role.
What are the emerging contact center technologies?
There is a whole variety of exciting and emerging technologies being used to support different aspects of the customer service experience and augment the work of your human agents.
Conversational AI is growing more sophisticated and multifunctional. The ability to provide efficient 24/7 support, via chatbots and virtual assistants, is valuable for a contact center in handling queries.
It is expected that Voice Call Automation and Chat Automation will become more advanced, with the ability to recognise the mood and intention of the customer through context and speech and text patterns. This helps to prepare the virtual agent to anticipate what the customer might want, making the experience more responsive and personalized.
The ability to detect customer intentions and emotions will also enhance your omnichannel support, as customers want to receive a cohesive experience when passed from one platform to another.
Whether a customer is interacting with your business through a phone call, instant messaging or other means, your business will be briefed on the history of that customer’s interactions and ready to pick up the conversation from any point.
What are the top 10 contact center technology trends?
As you might expect from these emerging trends, contact center technology is undergoing great advances in development with a more intelligent, holistic customer experience that brings value to other aspects of your business too. Here are the top 10 trends that stand out in 2023 and beyond.
Customers will expect omnichannel support
Omnichannel support is set to become the norm instead of an exciting novelty. Opening up multiple channels for communication will ensure a unified and consistent experience for customers across multiple platforms.
Your agents will remain well-informed about the customer regardless of the chosen platform of communication, as omnichannel support means integration across all channels.
If a human agent misses a customer call, they will still be able to carry out an effective follow-up as they will have access to information across all channels so will know what issue the customer is experiencing. Applying omnichannel support also ensures more sophisticated customer insights and analysis for your business so you can make informed decisions.
Focusing on customer experience analytics
Previously, businesses relied heavily on the expertise of individuals to drive their knowledge about customers. This expertise is still useful, but has its limitations. Now, a business is driven by data, and this is no different in contact centers.
Companies are applying insights and analytics to improve overall efficiency and customer experience. Remember to set your key metrics first and then apply data analytics technologies to pull out the information that is most relevant and valuable to you.
Boosting your competitive edge with personalization
Your business can create a hyper-personalized customer journey thanks to AI. Thanks to tools such as AI-powered conversational chatbots, you can respond to customer queries in real-time, mimic human interactions and collect in-depth consumer insights for future analysis and training.
AI can identify trends in customer data, ensure the right conversation is forwarded to the right agent, and even detect emotions in a customer’s message to ensure the right response.
This is all made possible by contextualizing the customer’s experience and personalizing their journey based on their unique profile.
Mapping out the customer journey in real-time
By mapping out your customer’s journey in real-time - essentially, tracking their journey along the customer service chain, you can eliminate uncertainty or disjointedness and create a better overall experience.
Customer journey mapping - looking at where your customer has been on the site and time spent on page - means you can learn more about them to respond in real-time. It gives you agents the information they need to gain a deeper understanding of the customer’s needs and respond in a helpful way, leading to faster problem resolutions.
Greater efficiency with customer self-service
The advancement of large language models - a language model that generates text in a human-like way - means there is greater potential for self-service than ever.
The appetite is there too. Particularly after the pandemic, customers have demonstrated a desire to be more independent and autonomous in their problem-solving by finding their own solutions.
This means no direct human interaction, but perhaps a tool such as an FAQ page or AI-driven conversational chatbot to respond to queries. The ability of AI to handle these types of more basic questions and issues also reduces the burden on your human agents.
A new concept - get ready for XCaaS
What is XCaaS? It stands for Experience Communications as a Service, combining the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) into a unified system, allowing your business to handle internal and external communications from a single license.
This also means greater integration of both the customer and employee experience into one centralized framework on the cloud. When you combine the different elements such as voice services, chat services, contact centers, video conferencing and even SMS, into one XCaaS, you can eliminate information silos and ensure greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
One single, integrated platform also means simpler data security and compliance, as well as improved analytics and more context to work in a more effective way.
CX teams will offer a multi-experience
Good service is meeting the customer where they are most comfortable interacting. But if you offer omnichannel support to the customer, it’s important that behind the scenes, you don’t create separate silos between departments and teams who can’t share data.
This can create friction and defeats the purpose of your seamless, multi-platform delivery. No customer wants to hit a dead end, potentially having to start from square one when transferred to a different agent or platform.
So you want to minimize internal processes and adapt new frameworks to prioritize customer comfort, making seamless transitions between different platforms. To the customer, it must all seem like one smoothly connected experience.
This can be done by ensuring that contextual information about a customer’s issue is communicated across multiple channels. For instance, if a customer begins their interaction by speaking to a chatbot and is then passed over to a human agent, the human agent needs to receive all the information the chatbot has already retained to ensure a seamless transition.
Live engagement tools will gain importance
A strong customer service experience relies on a responsive team, effective customer service agents and the offer of swift problem resolution. Engaging with customers in real-time makes it easier to achieve all three.
You can gather information on customers while using interactive methods like video chat or screen sharing, ensuring you can assist with their queries or problems much faster. It’s especially useful for agents who need to solve technical issues and diagnose problems.
Providing this type of live, technical support, working with the customer collaboratively to find the root of a problem, taps into the same consumer desire for autonomous solutions as self-service. It’s expected that in 2023 and beyond, you will be able to use these live engagement tools in a variety of ways to help customers.
The future of contact centers
With the rise in demand for a personalized customer experience and omnichannel support, technology will play an important role in the future of contact centers and customer experience.
Advances can help contact centers scale and gain crucial insights about their customers to inform long-term thinking. Tools such as conversational AI, voice and chat automation are key examples of contact center technologies that can help your agents become more responsive, more productive and transform the customer experience.
When surveyed, 60% of customer service agents said that AI helps them save time in their roles. Think about how your business can benefit from harnessing these new technologies, and how you can apply conversational AI to give your customer experience a boost.