The CX landscape is experiencing rapid growth and development, especially with the popularity of cloud computing solutions and automation options that are continually expanding its scope and offering a range of efficiencies.
North America in particular has seen massive growth in terms of CCaaS adoption, with a market share of 41.4% in the contact center space accounted for from the global CCaaS market.
These developments are primarily made to address the growing needs of the contemporary customer, who demands more personalization, more efficient processes, and an overall smoother customer experience.
Let’s take a look at the latest developments in the CX market you should know about to set up a smooth contact center operation in 2024.
Trend 1: Voice and email still rule supreme for customer interactions
The past year has been a big one for contact centers all around the world, with 76% of them experiencing higher interaction volumes across the board.
However, what stands out the most from this growth is the popularity of voice and email on the customers’ side, despite the development of automation options to facilitate interactions.
This further underlines the importance customers place on human interactions and the personalized CX delivery it enables.
Businesses would do well to account for this development with higher agent recruitment, more comprehensive training, and by implementing automation options like IVR and ACD to make their work more straightforward.
Trend 2: Investments into contact center development remain a high priority
It is no surprise that ever greater numbers of businesses are increasing their budgets to develop and upgrade their contact center operations with all these fancy new technologies entering the market. In fact, 55% of contact centers said that they are increasing their software budget in 2024.
That’s not all, contact center operators also understand the value of training and development for agents. Not only does it improve the overall quality of CX delivery, but it is also key to ensuring that their investments in new technologies pay the dividends they expect.
Contemporary businesses should take a page out of these contact centers and reassess their budgets, evaluate the technologies that are in use, and take the necessary steps to improve technology usage and develop evolving agent training programs.
Trend 3: Automated deflection is stirring up trouble for chatbots
With the slew of benefits that automation offers contact centers, there’s no wonder why it’s as popular as it is. One major aspect of contact center process automation is deflection. However, this seems to be stirring up more trouble than expected.
Turns out that virtual agents like chatbots are deflecting customer communications with no real understanding of their intent, which spells trouble for the customer experience.
While almost 86% of contact centers are content with their CX delivery when it comes to voice and email, only 26% say the same about their chatbots.
How can businesses counteract these deflection issues? First and foremost, using better technology. Most chatbots have limited natural language processing capabilities and in this day and age, it is simply not an option to omit having it. Solutions that are capable of conducting deeper sentiment analysis are still being perfected to overcome this issue.
In addition to that, CX orchestration to structure the customer journey across an omnichannel landscape is key. In today’s CX landscape where CCaaS migration is at an all-time high, businesses can utilize automated discovery services to make this process much more straightforward.
Understand the developments of the CX market to drive your contact center operations forward
Keeping up-to-date with trends is an essential part of developing a robust, future-facing contact center operation.
Implementing steps to ease agent workloads, investing in better technologies and agent training, as well as orchestrating the customer journey to avoid deflection hurdles will help you address the latest developments in the CX market.