The Future of CCaaS is Led by AI
AI has brought multiple, behind-the-scenes benefits to contact centers. The integration of AI into conversations has incited a revolution in terms of enhancing agents’ efficiency, especially during the pandemic. AI-based applications allow businesses to implement intuitive call routing and provide multichannel support. AI in contact centers will help supervisors manage agent productivity. It will not only assist in customer retention and loyalty through proactive service but also help understand patterns in customer behavior. Most importantly, AI brings the consistency that customers crave.
CCaaS Analytics
In today’s data-driven world, there is a paradigm shift in how contact centers drive adaptive management and improve the customer experience. Customer interactions lead to a vast amount of data, which, with the right analytics tool, can lead to insights into customer pain points and their journey with the brand. Using the same data, predictive analytics will play an important role in identifying future trends and opportunities by identifying customer retention opportunities and a customer’s preference for a particular product or service. In the fierce competition between contact center providers, those using predictive analytics will have a clear advantage.
Omni-channel Communication — The way forward
Though not an entirely new trend, omni-channel communication will continue to play an important role in unifying customer communication to standardize customer experience delivery. An omni-channel contact center enables agents to seamlessly move across channels and interaction touchpoints by personalizing every step of the customer journey. This is achieved by having seamlessly connected channels, fully integrated applications, and intelligent routing. An omni-channel solution is essential for an improved customer experience and should be taken into consideration when creating a strategy for customer engagement.
Self-Service
The age of reactionary customers is over. Today’s customers are informed, active, and tech-savvy. They are less willing to wait for the convenience of customer-support personnel and want reliable solutions quickly. Self-service is not just responsive chatbots; it is proactive engagement with customers to solve their trials using AI and analytics (predictive and self-service). Customers’ self-service tools will continue to increase, and organizations should focus on the availability of improved online self-service tools such as articles, video tutorials, and troubleshooting pages for the most common customer issues.
Conversational IVR
The emergence of AI has enlivened IVR technology. Call centers have been using IVR for years now, and the technology is not ready for the exit yet. The combination of IVR and AI has resulted in advanced IVR systems, such as conversational IVR, that play larger roles in modern call centers. Although customer service is now possible across multiple platforms, the phone is still one of the preferred ways to manage sensitive or high-priority queries.
XCaaS’s Emergence
As CCaaS replaces legacy call centers, XCaaS will soon redefine the future of customer experience. It combines CCaaS and UCaaS into a single offering, allowing organizations to manage both operations with a single license, resulting in improved analytics, data security, privacy, and governance at a lower cost. With XCaaS solutions, communications and interactions are in sync, eliminating the need for the customer to retell their story.
New RPA use cases
Robotics process automation has great potential to help contact centers. Robotic process automation (RPA) in contact center automates tedious activities and minimizes an agent’s time spent on repetitive processes. It can collect data from across different systems and present customer information for agents on a single interface. RPA’s use cases will continue to include data management, transaction implementation, data modifications in the system, managing recurring calls, automating the workforce, and preparing reports.
The Rise of Hyper-Personalization
Hyper-personalization unites real-time customer data with AI to generate insights. Either through humans or automation, organizations harness these to alter experiences for individual customers in real-time. Hyper-personalization expands these learnings to help companies connect with customers in the micro moments. Organization can pre-populate customer forms with client information, send proactive notifications, and launch a predictive contact center routing plan with the aid of hyper-personalization.
Author
Umang Thakur, Associate Research Director , Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.
