The Future of Contact Centers in 2024
eClerx Customer Operations
Transforming ordinary touchpoints into superior customer experiences
Under pressure to deliver cost-savings and higher-quality service, contact centers across the globe need to take advantage of emergent trends to mature alongside their customers’ expectations.
Contact centers are cornerstones in many CX strategies, and as industries continue to grow digitally, their importance has grown, too. But, this does not come without a set of challenges. The modern customer requires a new set of modern solutions tailored to solve their challenges faster, more seamlessly, and more accurately. Businesses need to leverage the contact center’s power to gauge customer sentiment to fuel predictive models and help businesses optimize processes across sales and marketing departments.
Beyond the customer-side challenges, many contact centers are still facing high levels of agent turnover, and the race to include more AI and automation tools has often resulted in frustration from both agents and customers. With industry leaders calling for budget reductions and customers demanding more tailored experiences, contact centers need to drive higher efficiency and invest in new tech innovations to deliver a modern experience.
Only by embracing current trends will contact centers be able to meet the expectations of both the modern customer and agent. From a greater focus on agent experiences to AI-powered strategies that offer more personalized support to customers, here are the trends shaping the future of contact centers.
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Generative AI Provides Easy CX Wins (and Losses)
Although still in its infancy, generative AI tools are more than just the latest fixation for contact centers, with 39% of contact center leaders expecting the technology to be the most influential trend in customer service over the next two years.
While the full potential of generative AI has yet to be seen, there are already a few existing use cases of these tools improving CX scores and reducing costs in contact centers, such as:
However, just like other AI tools, contact centers will need to be careful about their implementation of generative AI. Outside of complying with recent regulations, organizations will need to ensure their own generative AI tools are trained on a regular basis to provide up-to-date, relevant, and unbiased information. With 66% of agents lacking the skills to utilize generative AI technology properly, it is also vital for leaders to set time aside to educate their employees on these tools, allowing them not only to take full advantage of the benefits they have to offer, but also alleviate much of their skepticism towards this rising trend.
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Employee Experiences Become as Important as CX
While contact centers primarily exist to deliver excellent experiences to customers, a strategic priority in 2024 will be to make sure their agents also remain satisfied. With 76% of contact centers having experienced an increase in customer interactions during 2023, agents are feeling burnt out from their current workloads, leading to high levels of employee attrition over the last few years.
To counteract this rising statistic, contact center leaders will need to embrace the transformative benefits that omnichannel experiences provide. By removing the common issue of data siloing and building an interconnected system within a contact center, agents will be able to easily access and navigate through customer conversations, allowing for drastically decreased handling times and improved customer satisfaction scores.
Contact centers can also take advantage of generative AI and automation tools to help better acclimate agents to efficiently handle calls while also leaving behind much of the repetitive manual labor they encounter each day. Not only will this result in higher CX scores, but also happier employees that stay longer—contact centers that feature AI to assist agents are 20% more likely to have and keep a fully staffed organization.
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Personalized Interactions Become the Norm
Today, customers expect more than just basic interactions when reaching out to a contact center. With personalized services becoming widely popular, customers expect agents to be familiar with their past and current experiences and want a tailored solution that fits their specific situation.
Contact centers have access to an immense amount of customer data, and 2024 is set to be the year they take full advantage of it to offer their own personalized interactions and experiences. Through omnichannel services and data-driven insights, agents can get a better idea of each customer’s favorite channel of choice and the most relevant information to deliver the solutions they need significantly quicker than traditional methods.
Contact center leaders also elevate their personalization approach one step further through predictive models. Instead of waiting for customers to run into an issue to contact an agent, these AI and machine learning-powered models can deliver insights that can allow contact centers to reach out proactively and alert them of potential pain points before they occur. This not only allows agents to devote their time to other high-value cases but also significantly boosts customer satisfaction scores.
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Strategic Partnerships Grow in Popularity
Adopting the latest technology and reducing agent turnover is a great start for contact centers to optimize their workspace. However, with the rapid increase in interaction volumes and customer expectations, these trends may not deliver on these transformative efforts in time.
While shifting customers towards digital and self-service channels can offer momentary help, 83% of contact centers have turned to forming strategic partnerships with third-party organizations to meet their service levels. As companies experienced in a variety of customer operations, these external partners can optimize contact centers by offering:
Once these strategic partnerships are established, contact centers no longer have to spend the time and money looking for new hires and technology partners, gaining a welcome level of scalability that delivers better customer experiences at a fraction of the cost if done internally.
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Ensure Your Contact Center Has the Tools it Needs
2024 is looking to be a pivotal year for contact centers, and the most successful will be the ones that optimize and adapt their operations to the modern landscape. However, these sweeping changes are often easier said than done.
At eClerx, we recognize that contact center transformations don’t happen overnight, which is why we offer our clients?in-depth CX consulting to target trouble areas, as well as offering additional support through our own highly trained agents and automation technology, to ensure they are prepared for any challenges that may arise.