Cloud contact center isn’t just a clever buzz phrase for big businesses anymore. Small Business Trends reports that Seventy percent of businesses either are planning to migrate their contact center to the cloud within the next year, or already have a cloud based contact center in place. This isn’t just a fancy fad: Market watch predicts that by 2024, that the $8.9 billion cloud contact center market will grow to more than $33 billion.
As cloud contact centers continue to become the way to do business, critical trends are surfacing that are promising a strong year in 2020.
2020 Cloud Contact Center Trends
- A Legitimate Omnichannel Experience Offers More Robust Ways To Communicate.
The omnichannel experience is old hat in the contact center world, however many times not utilized to its fullest capabilities. A legitimate omnichannel experience enables customers to navigate effortlessly from one method of communications to another. When fully integrated and utilized as designed, omnichannel offerings ensure organizations can meet hyper evolving customer expectations.
As an example, MiCloud Connect Contact Center, enables your clients to easily interact with your agents, no matter what their channel of choice, without having to repeat their troubles or lose their information.
- Training And Assistance Performed By A.I.
Gartner survey recently came out that Fifty-nine percent of organizations have already deployed AI, with many more organizations planning to implement AI projects during 2020. Gartner also forecasts that by 2021, AI interactions will handle 15 percent of all customer interactions. We’re just scratching the surface of how AI will transform cloud contact centers, and the customer experience. Major planned investments will enable AI to have an even bigger and badder role in how we interact with our customers over the next year.
This will include real-time training and coaching through virtual agent assist, or chatbots.
MiCloud Connect CX already handles this type of training. Speech analytics transcribes recorded conversations and uses AI to analyze key moments for coaching so your team can deliver better interactions. AI virtual agents also monitor conversations and present agents with relevant information that help them resolve customer questions more quickly and effectively.
The result? A more pleasant customer experience and a more effective interaction that’s on-brand and on-message. New agents handle calls like seasoned veterans in no time, and supervisors spend less time on training.
- Impactful Analytics.
AI ensures more impactful and meaningful data analytics. Contact centers have been collecting data on customers since their inception, but the information’s useless if it’s not accurate, or properly analyzed and applied.
Natural language processing (NLP) interpret data and provide analysis around the “why” of customers contacting your company, ways you can improve your products and services and how you make information available to customers. This data enables you to move beyond contact center efficiency and focus on improving the overall customer experience. Since these insights are created in real-time, you can respond and adapt to customers’ preferences quickly, increasing loyalty while staying ahead of the competition.
- Self-Service Is A Big Deal.
Customers often prefer to help themselves. They don’t want to get stuck in a queue or wait for a human agent – especially when they have a simple question about a product or service. Chatbots are the primary means of self-service, so it should be no surprise that the global chatbot market is expected to hit $5.63 billion by 2023, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 34 percent over the 2018-2023 period.
Chatbots allow customers to get answers to basic questions and FAQs. They also free up human agents to focus on more complex queries and keep wait times down for those who really do need to speak to a live agent.
A key differentiator in 2020 will be the provision of chatbots that create a smooth transition when a customer needs live support. Smartbots route customers to an agent with the appropriate level of expertise and provide agents with a full history of the customer engagement. This saves customers from having to repeat themselves and enables agents to pick up exactly where the chatbot left off.
Expanded FAQs and video tutorials are other ways in which cloud contact centers will offer self-service in 2020, so businesses need to be sure they’re prepared to meet those demands, as well.
- Contact Center Agents Move From Reactive To Proactive.
Integration with CRM systems provides cloud contact center agents with detailed customer data in real time. When customers call with an issue, agents have instant access to purchase histories and other relevant details. That allows them to take a more proactive role in addressing the customer’s issue.
MiCloud Connect CX is an example of a cloud contact center solution that integrates with your CRM so you can immediately assess customer information and create a more personalized interaction. Agents can even note the customer’s mood, which can trigger automated actions and help your business better prepare for future interactions. Personalization and customer sentiment help your business improve customer satisfaction levels and monitor them over time.
- The Rise Of The Remote Contact Center Workforce.
The days of large rooms full of agents answering calls are disappearing. Cloud contact centers have ushered in the ability to maintain a remote contact center workforce, without the need to offshore calls to a third-party vendor. With a cloud contact center, agents can be dispersed throughout the country, putting them closer to your customers. The money saved on office space and other overhead can be applied toward hiring local talent that can provide localized service. “Homeshoring” improves customer satisfaction, and we expect this trend to continue in 2020.
There’s no doubt that 2020 will be an exciting time. Innovations in cloud contact center solutions will give your business the advantage it needs to remain competitive in a customer-driven world. And by putting these cloud trends at the center of your contact center plans, you’ll be sure to meet your customers’ expectations for a stellar experience.
