Customer relationships are critical for driving sales and retaining high-value customers in today's competitive environment. Meanwhile, seamless communications across various channels ensure customer satisfaction throughout the buying journey. Contact centers are essential for delivering a top-notch customer experience, and keeping up with the latest technology trends will help you stay relevant and competitive.
What is contact center technology?
Contact center technology combines multiple hardware and software to manage and facilitate customer interactions. These include Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Unified Communications (UC) platforms, etc., to handle inbound and outbound customer communications via phone, video calls, email, chat, social media, and more.
These systems and tools help streamline customer service, increase operational efficiency, enhance the customer experience, and boost customer engagement metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer lifetime value (CLV). By making it easier for consumers to do business with your brand, contact centers help you increase revenue and improve customer retention.
Top 8 contact center technology trends in 2024
The key to delivering a top-notch customer experience via your contact center starts with the right technologies. Here are the top trends in 2024 to incorporate into your strategy:
1. Generative AI
Contact center AI technology has already changed many business processes. And it will continue to impact contact center operations in the coming years.
80% of customer service and support organizations will use generative contact center AI technology to boost agent productivity, improve customer experience, and increase customer retention by 2025. For example, conversational AI enables machines to understand, process, and respond to human language. It can recognize all speech and text input formats and respond to queries in multiple languages.
Contact centers may use chatbots to handle repetitive inquiries and enhance self-service options by delivering 24/7 support through natural language conversations. AI chatbots also help reduce agent workloads, allowing them to focus on complex issues. Meanwhile, intelligent virtual assistants may analyze context and customer history to provide predictive responses and relevant recommendations to improve resolution rates.
2. Omnichannel support
Today's consumers expect the ability to interact with brands via multiple channels (e.g., phone, video, SMS, chat, social media, etc.) throughout the customer journey — picking up where they've left off without missing a beat. For example, GoTo Connect Contact Center allows you to unify various channels to facilitate seamless interactions. You can streamline the customer experience and reduce friction along the purchasing path.
Live engagement tools like video chats and co-browsing facilitate seamless interaction across channels. They enable agents to identify issues and deliver solutions quickly by diagnosing problems on the spot and collaborating with the caller to resolve them. This capability helps customers get the most out of your products and reduce frustration, improving customer satisfaction and retention.
3. Intelligent call routing
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has been around for a while. However, AI technologies have given this "oldie but goodie" a substantial makeover. For example, by integrating AI's speech recognition capabilities with IVR technologies, contact centers can reduce handling time and improve first-call resolutions by directing callers to the right agent or employee with the most relevant expertise to address their concerns.
You may also use intelligent call routing to determine priority queueing and agent assignment based on customer value tier and purchase history, delivering faster, targeted services to improve customer loyalty and retention. Meanwhile, intelligent self-service tools increase customer satisfaction, reduce inquiry times, and provide automated assistance across languages and channels to bring more convenience to your customers.
4. Hyper-personalization
According to McKinsey, companies that invest in hyper-personalization technologies increase their market share by over 10%. Meanwhile, 62% of consumers say they won't remain loyal to a business after an un-personalized encounter. Top-notch customer support begins with giving your agents accurate context and information to personalize customer interactions.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system captures valuable data like order histories, support tickets, and product preferences. When you integrate it with your contact center technologies, agents can easily access the latest customer information to contextualize the conversations, deliver intelligence-driven customer services, and offer data-backed recommendations while improving productivity and resolution rates.
5. Contact center analytics
Everywhere you turn, you hear about the power of data-driven decisions. So, how do you apply data insights to enhance contact center operations?
Businesses may collect data from customer interactions and use AI-powered speech, text, and QA analytics tools to uncover actionable, data-driven insights to improve service quality. You may also use AI tools to monitor a caller's mood and trigger real-time recommendations, like a discount for a dissatisfied customer with a high churn risk. You may also analyze recorded calls and online chats to identify areas for improvement.
For instance, GoTo Connect Contact Center offers real-time analytics and reporting tools to help agents and supervisors make informed decisions via instant, daily, and weekly statistics. You can get insights quickly without buying additional analytics tools or hiring a data analyst. Managers may also use the call metrics to uncover trends, understand customer sentiment, and identify coaching opportunities to improve service quality.
6. "Single pane of glass" dashboard
AI and data analytics technologies provide real-time insights, but they're only as good as your agents' ability to leverage them during customer conversations. A "single pane of glass" dashboard shows agents relevant customer data from multiple sources and AI recommendations in one place to help them deliver personalized and meaningful interactions.
For example, agents may see a unified view of a customer with information like account and loyalty details, purchase histories, and previous agent interactions to guide their interactions. Meanwhile, supervisors may view contact center KPIs, total talk time, hold time, and assigned queue status to understand agent performance and provide timely coaching to improve the customer experience.
7. Advanced call queuing
The best training and technology won't deliver the intended outcomes if callers hang up before they speak with your agents due to long wait times.
Lengthy hold times create a frustrating customer experience, diminishing customer loyalty and even leading to the loss of sales. Call queueing capabilities help you manage customer expectations with queue position and estimated wait time announcements to minimize abandoned calls. You may also use ACD software to distribute calls and connect customers with agents with the most relevant skills.
Meanwhile, more consumers expect callback queue capabilities where they can leave a contact number, hold their place in line, and receive a call back instead of staying on the phone. Modern call queueing technologies help ease the waiting experience and minimize customer frustration, especially if a contact center encounters substantial delays during peak periods.
8. Outbound dialer
Outbound calls support direct sales, research, polling, and lead generation. You may also contact prospects and customers based on past interactions to proactively provide product recommendations or address issues. An outbound dialer helps you organize these opportunities, automate sales calls, improve operational efficiency, and facilitate your outreach processes.
Predictive dialing combines sophisticated data analytics with an outbound dialer to help you optimize agent productivity, minimize downtime, and increase engagement rates by automatically queueing and placing calls (e.g., to high-quality prospects/warm leads who are more likely to buy.) Agents can also see each customer's information on their dashboards to personalize the conversations.
Improve Customer Experience and Operational Efficiency with Modern Contact Center Technologies
Contact center technologies have grown by leaps and bounds. Businesses must meet fast-evolving customer expectations by using the latest features and capabilities. The good news is you don't have to purchase multiple software, connect the dots, and set up everything from scratch.
GoTo Connect gives you access to the latest cloud contact center technology. You can create a modern customer experience in less time with features like pre-saved messages, omnichannel support, agent dashboard, real-time analytics, intelligent call routing, call monitoring, visual dial plan editor, and more.
Learn more about GoTo Connect Contact Center and request a demo to see how we can help you up your customer experience game while improving operational efficiency.
