In recent years, contact centers have become the epicenter of CX management, with cornerstone technologies that have enabled contact centers to evolve at an unprecedented pace.
They enable businesses to deliver personalized and efficient customer service and provide valuable insights into customer behavior patterns and preferences. CCaaS vendors are also actively updating their portfolios with innovative technologies to cope with these changes.
However, as technology continues to evolve, contact centers must also adapt in order to meet the changing needs of customers and the overall market.
Read on and explore the future trends in CX based on the evolution of cornerstone contact center technologies.
- Cloud-based platforms have become the norm
Cloud-native platforms are becoming the mainstay technology that is powering CCaaS because they pave the way for better scalability, ease of integration, and data accessibility.
The benefits of cloud-based platforms also allow businesses to keep up with the latest updates, access the latest version of each technology, and evolve with it. Cloud-based contact centers also offer greater flexibility in terms of agent locations. With remote work becoming more prevalent, cloud-based contact centers allow agents to work from anywhere with an internet connection.
To achieve this, vendors are building agile contact centers that are cloud-native and with the ability to react to emerging trends, manage data better, and harness analytics tools to make data-driven decisions.
This approach enables managers to simplify their roles and allows for the creation of a unified view of the customer.
- Interoperability is now the first priority
The CCaaS market is becoming increasingly saturated, as major CRM and UCaaS vendors have entered the space to provide their own solutions and reduce complexity by converging CCaaS with other technologies from a single vendor.
However, these integrated solutions/platforms are still in their infancy—hence, mid-market and enterprise customers must exercise caution. Especially organizations that consider their contact center to be mission-critical.
Therefore, increasing interoperability within the CX stack must take precedence. Such interoperability includes tight integrations between the contact center, CRM, ERP, marketing, and many more platforms.
With this level of interoperability, operations can unlock a unified view of the customer and provide holistic levels of engagement and CX with every interaction.
- Agent satisfaction converges with CX delivery
Attrition, absence, and low engagement rates are all pressing contact center problems and symptoms of inadequate agent experiences.
Technology has also played its part here, as agents often use a multitude of different disjointed tools during customer interactions. Customers become frustrated as agents need to delve into many systems to retrieve the information that is required to progress with the interaction, leading to high stress among agents.
To address these challenges, modern platforms account for employee experience difficulties, such as inflexible schedules, micromanagement, and high occupancy rates.
Reporting tools help to tie CX and agent satisfaction together, and specialist providers can migrate current systems to a modern solution with real-time monitoring, historical reporting, and many more functionalities.
Futureproof your contact center and align it with evolving CX technologies
As cornerstone technologies around contact center operations continue to evolve rapidly making waves in the CX landscape, it is becoming clear that these trends will define the future of contact center operations.
Organizations that adapt in line with these trends will be better positioned to provide a more engaging and efficient customer experience, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and revenue growth.
Therefore, it is recommended that organizations gain insights through reliable CX forensics to uncover opportunities to integrate transformational technologies into CX systems and future-proof them for uncompromised and long-term customer satisfaction.