4 Contact Center Trends Focused on Improving the Customer Experience

4 Contact Center Trends Focused on Improving the Customer Experience

Sharing a positive or negative experience has never been easier, thanks to social media. Switching brands due to a negative experience has never been easier, thanks to a saturated marketplace and instant access to information about other options.

Customers have never felt as empowered as they do today. They demand the product or service they want, when they want it, at the price they want to pay. They expect the product or service to be easy and enjoyable to use, and they expect issues to be resolved quickly on their terms.

Over the past several years, customers have been showing brands who’s boss. Smart organizations have been implementing tools and developing strategies that optimize the customer experience. That includes enhancements to the contact center, which can play a critical role in customer retention and loyalty.

As customer demands continue to increase, organizations will need to up their game to remain competitive. Here are four of the top trends we see driving contact center improvements in 2020.

1) More Intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is permeating every part of the organization, and the contact center is no exception. AI takes many forms in the contact center, such as intelligent call and chat routing, chatbots, and algorithms capable of identifying upsell and cross-promotional opportunities. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to resolving customer issues, AI allows you to personalize and optimize each experience by understanding customer intent, sentiment, frustration and any relevant contextual information. As AI programs consume more data, they “learn” more about the customer and can more accurately understand and predict their needs.

2) More Analysis. Of course, AI drives advanced contact center analytics. With advanced analytics, the goal isn’t just to solve the customer’s problem but to predict the customer’s problem and the best way to fix it without the customer having to spell out every detail. Analytics not only improves customer satisfaction but agent satisfaction and productivity by providing them with the tools and data required to meet customer expectations. From an operational standpoint, AI-driven analytics can predict call volume so you can efficiently allocate resources, which will also help you deliver a better customer experience.

3) More Integration. Customers won’t tolerate an experience that involves waiting on a contact center agent to switch applications to retrieve data from a live chat interaction. Customers won’t tolerate repeating the same information when they’re passed to a different agent. In 2020, more organizations will adopt fully integrated, omnichannel contact center solutions that bring together voice, email, video, instant messaging, chat and social media into a single interface. An interaction history from all communication channels will be available to contact center agents so they can make faster, more-informed decisions.

4) More Self-Service. Many customers would rather not deal with an agent. This is why organizations are investing in self-service options and resources such as video tutorials, FAQ pages, forums and interactive voice response. Self-service also reduces the workload of human agents, which allows them to spend more time on complex problem solving.

Verteks Consulting focuses on aligning technology with business processes and priorities. For most organizations, there is no higher priority than optimizing the customer experience. Let us help you capitalize on the latest contact center trends and capabilities to deliver a seamless, stress-free experience for your customers.


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