Having a contact center and following the contact center automation trends is more important than ever. In the post-COVID world, it is essential to offer the best possible remote customer service. Beyond what your customers would expect, it is crucial to profitability. According to a PWC survey, one in three customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. Meanwhile, 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. For this reason, contact center technology is so important. Even though you can't watch every interaction with a customer, you can use technology to identify them. Also, resolve problems before they have a negative impact on your revenue. When the right technology is used properly, it boosts productivity, enhances efficiency, simplifies analytics, and improves the customer experience. Contact centers will continue to implement even more cutting-edge technologies, solutions, and applications in 2024.
Utilizing the most advanced technology in the contact centers will be the key to the company's strategy. Technology is a differentiator and a driving force behind best-in-class contact centers' ability to excel in customer service.
In this article, we go through what customers expect from customer service and the contact center automation trends to watch in the following year.
Customers would expect prompt and high-quality customer service. As a result, many businesses have made excellent customer service a top strategic priority, while others are already doing so to their advantage. Business owners with large budgets purchase the best customer support software tools.
Even so, it can be difficult to go above and beyond these days to keep customers satisfied. Why? Due to the enormous, competitive, and uncertain nature of the market, which is best illustrated by the constantly shifting expectations of customers. Although customers are now the center of customer service, their expectations are unavoidably shifting.
It's helpful to go back to the fundamentals and determine what customers actually want in order to make the concept of excellent customer service seem less nebulous and more achievable. Understanding the fundamental requirements for good customer service can help you spot potential weaknesses in your service strategy and suggest ways to strengthen it.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that customers demand and expect to connect with your company whenever, wherever, and however they want. Customers want the option to switch channel interactions while maintaining a seamless, cohesive experience. Whether this means by phone, text, web, email, or virtual assistant.
According to statistics, companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain, on average, 89% of their customers. Only 35% of companies adopt an omnichannel approach to customer service.
Considering an integrated omnichannel as a customer experience and customer engagement strategy that offers a stronger competitive advantage is crucial. Omnichannel contact centers will enable agents to easily switch between channels and interaction touchpoints by personalizing each step of the customer journey. In addition to interactions that follow customers from channel to channel while gathering crucial data along the way. An omnichannel strategy must include seamlessly connected channels, fully integrated applications, and intelligent routing.
One of the earliest contact center automation trends is Interactive Voice Response (IVR). All contact centers still regard IVR as their primary channel of communication. With advancements in automation, remote working options, conversational AI, and speech recognition, IVR should be the starting point for improvement, with a focus on streamlining procedures, employing new technologies, and maximizing existing ones. According to a Statista statistic, 40% of organizations already using IVR increased its use. The best way to handle delicate or important customer interactions is still by phone, despite the existence of all other channels.
The Live software solution can help you with a visual interface to create an IVR tree. Live can provide you with an adaptable IVR editor with various features. Those features include essentials like menus, custom music and messages, queue routing, and more advanced features like authorization text-to-speech and multilingual capabilities.
Without a doubt, technology's disruptive power has contributed to almost all the changes in the contact center industry. There has been a rapid pace of innovation, and new contact center solutions have appeared frequently. Artificial intelligence is one of this area's most recent contact center automation trends. It offers substantial advantages through various autonomous and semi-autonomous software applications that automate processes. AI enhances every aspect of the business. From intuitively routing customer interactions to the most qualified agent to giving agents predictive responses when resolving customer inquiries.
Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence (AI) has a place in contact centers. The race to develop and implement AI solutions that improve contact center operations is at full power. We anticipate that the digitization of contact centers will continue to benefit significantly from contact center automation trends in artificial intelligence.
Our interactions with companies have changed significantly as a result of chat features and the advent of chatbots. Chat is frequently the preferred communication channel because it is immediate, interactive, available around the clock, and doesn't require live agent support, depending on the demographics and type of interaction.
Chatbots, conversational AI, or virtual AI assistants are used across industries to carry out a wide range of tasks, including simple question answering, appointment setting or revision, account and payment information, and much more. An integrated omnichannel solution that caters to customers' sustainable solutions should include chat and chatbots as an important part of contact center automation trends.
Related article: Types of chatbot and how to choose the best one for your business?
Traditional data-collection techniques, such as surveys, are useful for businesses to measure customer satisfaction, but they are unable to meet the diverse data needs. Companies can now use predictive analytics to gather precise, unbiased data about customer interactions, which serves as a more accurate indicator of customer satisfaction and experience. Utilizing predictive analytics to drive business decisions can assist companies in meeting customer needs because it is strengthened by machine learning.
This brings us to the next major customer experience trend that is becoming more prevalent and will only get bigger in the upcoming year.
It goes without saying that modern customers are tech-savvy and have attention spans that are much shorter than in the past. As a result, they lose patience easily when they have to wait a long time for their problems to be resolved. According to statistics, 79% of customers say they expect to have a self-service option.
This data makes it perfectly clear that, given the appropriate methods, customers would prefer to resolve a problem independently. Brands would greatly benefit from investing in these technologies. They would give their customers the power to solve their own problems in the simplest way possible.
Customer service still holds a high priority. Self-service is, instead, increasingly taking over as the preferred form of customer support. When it comes to finding solutions to their problems, customers have a strong preference for independence. That is precisely what self-service tools provide. The contact center agents, on the other hand, benefit from customer self-service. Yet how? In any case, customers only use contact centers as a last resort. They won't try to call if they can quickly find clarifications or answers on a company's resources. Call lines become shorter as a result. Agents can concentrate on resolving complex problems because it saves them time.
Contact center automation trends in customer experience are becoming a broad concept that frequently goes beyond the goods or services customers purchase. Exciting pre-purchase interactions, easy and seamless payment processes with prompt issue resolution. Also, 24/7 customer support that empowers rather than hinders the customers, as well as non-intrusive, genuinely curious follow-ups with helpful content, are all essential components of a well-rounded, memorable experience. These actions set the stage for future up-selling and cross-selling.
You must adapt to the use of contact center automation trends such as AI, sophisticated IVR, and recall innovations. Even better, you should prioritize using omnichannel communication and cutting-edge self-service tools.
It is important to view the adoption and implementation of new technologies to meet these demands as strategic initiatives. While improving every contact center metric, including agent productivity and engagement, business profitability, customer engagement and experience, and more.
Learn more about how the Live product family can help you support and improve your customer experience strategy.
