The future trends of Contact Centre and what to look out for in 2022
About 79% of consumers believe that a company's experience is as important as its product or services. It reflects the growing demand for customer engagement.
In this age, customer experience happens to be a key factor that determines a business’s success. To back this, A study claims that 86% of the customers are willing to pay more if it comes with a better customer experience.
So, the next curious question that arises is how does a business provide the best CX and what are the future contact centre trends that paves way for it, let’s dive deep.
- Omnichannel and mobile-first infrastructure
Adobe recently found that companies with the most robust omnichannel customer engagement strategies enjoy a 10% year-on-year growth, a 10% increase in average order value and a 25% increase in close rates.
Omnichannel contact center is a customer centric approach that helps business connect all their touchpoints and provide 360-degree access to your agents. These touchpoints range from mobile apps, website, email, SMS, call and in-store.
Omnichannel contact centers simply give a good context for your business before initiating connection with your customers. This complete context on customers in terms of their previous outreach, engagement, query status, etc, agents would be able to provide the adequate service without having to go back and forth with the customers. This saves time for both the agents and the customers.
Importance of mobile-first infrastructure:
According to Stat Counter, 52% of all internet traffic comes from mobile, with desktop usage declining. And it is no surprise that 84% of companies that claim to be customer-centric are now focusing on the mobile customer experience.
Prioritising a mobile-centric customer engagement strategy is the growing and next big thing when it comes to providing the best customer experience.
As smartphones are the major contributors to the whole of internet traffic, it has become inevitable that businesses started to exploit the benefits. Its user-friendliness and speed are unparalleled, and hence customers expect their issues to be solved quickly.
However, the reality is that most businesses haven’t adapted to the mobile-first approach. As a result, customers don’t prefer businesses that don’t have a properly functioning mobile site/app, good UI and highly responsive mobile site/app.
2. Self-servicing tools
40% of consumers now prefer self-service over human contact and 70% of customers now expect a company’s website to include a self-service application. (Source: The Self Serving Economy)
Self servicing tools help customers to fix the simplest of problems by themselves without reaching out to the support team. These tools might range from the simplest of FAQ pages and chatbots to dedicated video tutorials, catalogues and applications.
These self-service tools help you
- Minimise the call volume for your support team
- Filter DIY issues from complex problems that need assistance
- Cut cost and save time for your agents
3. Video support centre and issue resolution
Video based support centre is highly interactive solutions that bind all the silos of virtual communication.
There might be instances where your customer might be referring to something, and your agents wouldn’t be able to grasp it or vice versa. To avoid misunderstanding, businesses have come up with a solution. A video-based support centre helps make the conversation similar to that of a face to face interaction. This makes the entire query resolution process easy for both your agent and your customer.
With Co-browsing functionality, your agents can take control of your customer’s device to solve the issues all by themselves. This will enable your agents to take the customers through or solve the issue for the customer themselves. This video-based assistance has a massive impact on CX in terms of:
- Real-time query resolution: Live communication tools like video chat and co-browsing help diagnose the issue and come up with a solution faster.
- Maximise productivity: Effectively helps cut short the time spent on issue resolution for both the agent and the customer.
- Improve FCR rate: Scale First Contact Resolution rate, which is the business’s ability to solve customer issues right after the first time they reach out for help.
4. AI-enabled IVR and voice bots
Compared to customer touchpoints, the IVR system is slow and frustrating because it doesn’t allow customers to get straight to the point. This led to businesses finding an alternative that handles customer queries effectively and saves response and waiting time.
Thus arose voice bots, an AI-based bot that identifies customers’ voice commands by transcribing and responding to queries through voice or text. With such technology, customers can straight away ask, “What’s the update on my last order?” instead of dialling in a predefined set of IVR inputs.
In the future of CX report, PwC surveyed 15,000 consumers and found that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. At the same time, 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.
This proves that one instance of bad experience leads to the loss of a valuable customer customer. Voice bots provide better context and also give customers a human touch to the conversations.
Not just support, voice bots could also play a significant role in qualifying sales leads where the predefined set of questions that are mandatorily asked could be automated. This reduces sales agents’ burden and efficiently manages leads at a rapid pace.
Sentiment analysis and predictive analytics with AI
These days, as the usage volumes are on a rise, businesses are bombarded with customer queries, and each ticket carries different complexities and emotions behind it. This results in difficulties for your support agents or an analyst to go through every conversation and analyse the severity of a customer’s issue.
This is where businesses analyse the sentiment of the conversation in bulk and help filter out the conversations that express a negative tone. When the tool is trained and fed with negative words and tags, such tickets are filtered and escalated so that they are resolved on priority.
And when combined with predictive tools… (Access the complete blog here: Emerging contact centre trends for 2022 )
5. Hybrid work infrastructure
Hybrid work infrastructure is scalable and flexible. It doesn’t require a dedicated in house physical infrastructure nor does it need to be set up and maintained like the on-premise systems. This pandemic forced businesses to adapt to a remote/hybrid work infrastructure. This was also a boon for businesses where it pushed them to bring together all their systems for better manageability, a 360-degree view on customer-facing activities.
As these systems are cloud based, they come on a subscription basis and can be scaled as per the business requirements. These systems are cost-effective when compared to the traditional contact centre, which doesn’t provide the feature set, integration capabilities and remote operability too.
6. Real-time insights and analytics
As the remote work infrastructure easily enabled businesses to integrate all their systems across the organisation, it helped businesses leverage their reporting and analytical capabilities.
Advanced analytic tools help generate all of the real-time insights from various other sub tools like CRM, Helpdesk, ERP, etc.
These analytic tools not only help evaluate customer satisfaction levels but also help with enhancing and scaling business SLAs accordingly.
To wrap it up,
The future lies in providing the best customer experience. However, manually going about the mundane activities seem to be exhaustive for the agents. This leaves businesses moving towards automating their business communication suite with artificial intelligence. Reach out to us if you are looking for a full-stack contact centre that’ll help you stay on top of these trends. Book a consultation here.
This post was originally made by Exotel — Asia’s leading cloud telephony company
