In today’s dynamic business landscape, it’s essential to provide exceptional customer experiences (CX) efficiently while alleviating the burden on agents. This requires the use of automation and related technologies to expedite and manage manual processes, ensuring they keep up with fast-changing customer expectations.
Fortunately, business process automation offers a solution, particularly tools such as artificial intelligence (AI). These innovative tools enable companies to streamline contact center operations, making tasks more manageable and, at the same time:
- Uplift the employee experience
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Increase operational efficiency
- Maximize the return on investment (ROI)
It’s crucial to strategically implement automation in business processes. To begin, we’ll discuss emerging contact center trends that are shaping the future of automation and offer insights on how your business can make the most of these developments.
1: Conversational AI for self-service
According to Deloitte’s 2023 survey, contact centers rank new self-service capabilities as their top investment priority. In fact, 90% of leaders will invest in such solutions over the next two years, citing a desire to increase virtual agent interactions.
In short, a virtual agent is an example of robotic process automation. It uses conversational AI and natural language processing to handle routine tasks and customer issues without human agent intervention. This can streamline first-contact resolution and improve customer satisfaction, providing fast and easy support.
Generally, these self-service tools come in two varieties:
- Chatbots: Organizations can embed live chat features on websites where consumers ask the virtual agent questions. It can direct the user to relevant resources and departments, routing them based on a company and customer data knowledge base.
- Interactive voice response (IVR): Voice-based virtual agents can augment IVR systems with intelligent automation. Much like a chatbot, conversational IVRs process information in real time, allowing them to respond with relevant answers.
These systems provide a tangible boost to operational efficiency. McKinsey estimates that IVR systems can improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores by five times and reduce the number of live-agent calls by over 10%.
By streamlining routine tasks, automation technology empowers contact center agents to focus on other responsibilities, knowing that the system can automatically elevate the user to a human agent for more complex inquiries while retaining a complete history of the previous interaction.
2. Sentiment analysis and speech analytics
The rapid growth of speech analytics is another automation trend leaning heavily on artificial intelligence. Combined with sentiment analysis, this emerging technology is helping contact center agents gain insight into consumer sentiment.
How does it work? Machine learning algorithms use natural language understanding (NLU) to process phonetic signals. In other words, it analyzes the customer’s speech pattern and tone during the interaction. Then, it classifies the call as positive, neutral, or negative.
This solution provides valuable insight into the customer experience. For instance, supervisors can compare scores against automated transcripts to understand why the call was positive or negative. This can help improve agent training and script compliance, not to mention quality assurance.
Plus, there’s a real business impact. According to McKinsey, speech analytics can drive cost savings of up to 30% and improve CSAT scores by 10%.
3. Customer-centricity
The third trend shaping contact center automation is the continued rise of customer-centricity. The idea is simple: Putting customer needs first won’t only improve your brand image, but it can also lead to several competitive advantages. For example, customer-centric organizations can expect:
- Stronger retention: A positive customer experience may lead to more frequent purchases, maximizing lifetime value.
- Reduced churn: Meeting customer expectations will delight consumers, giving them fewer reasons to abandon their brands for a competitor.
- Better decision-making: Focusing on CX allows you to analyze customer behavior. These findings, in turn, provide valuable insight into preferences, trends, and motivations.
As this new service model grows popular, organizations can leverage automation technology to make it more targeted and effective. After all, no two consumers are the same—and that’s why customer interaction analytics are so important.
AI-powered contact center solutions can automatically capture, transcribe, and analyze interactions. This makes it easier to understand the nuance behind granular customer needs and whether agents are meeting them effectively. Topic analysis, for example, provides insight into why consumers are reaching out. Moreover, it allows you to view trending topics and identify areas of interest or potential friction.
By mining interaction data, automation technology makes driving continuous improvement easier. This means you can pinpoint patterns in associate activity and customer feedback—and, in turn, develop ways to improve agent productivity, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency, paving the way for a brighter future.
4. Generative AI for agent assistance
Perhaps the most impactful automation trend is that of generative AI. Powered by large language models (LLMs), this type of artificial intelligence is uniquely adept at producing various forms of content, including original text, audio, and imagery.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of customer service and customer support organizations will use it to improve agent productivity and CX. Why? Because the use cases are practically endless, and the technology is readily available.
Webex Contact Center, for instance, offers a suite of generative capabilities:
- Chat summarization: People hate repeating themselves, which often happens when chatbots escalate customer issues to a human agent. Generative AI can eliminate this pain point by automatically creating a recap of every chat, call, and conversation—even ones that drop. This ensures full contextual awareness and seamless transition between channels.
- Suggested responses: As a virtual assistant, AI tools can automatically recommend replies based on customer data, such as their previous interactions and behaviors. This speeds up the response process, supporting operational efficiency while giving customers the answers they need faster than ever.
- Automated agent answers: Generative AI can expedite the interaction by tapping into the company’s knowledge base for quick, accurate answers. For example, it can make suggestions for articles that address customer inquiries, highlighting the most relevant part of the content for easy reference.
5. AI-powered burnout detection
Contact center agents work hard to deliver a positive customer experience. Going above and beyond can have negative impacts on the workforce. In fact, according to a 2020 study, agent turnover is double that of any other industry. Burnout causes 50% of the churn, which costs businesses nearly $5 million annually on average.
That’s a big problem, but fortunately, technology provides several solutions. For instance, Webex Contact Center offers AI-powered agent burnout detection. It’s an automation tool that uses AI to identify agents at risk of burning out, allowing supervisors to step in and lend a hand.
In addition to wellness, Webex can help managers coach agents to success, such as after a difficult call or part of the regular training process. AI-driven coaching highlights generate a centralized dashboard where you can quickly view the highest- and lowest-rated interactions.
This tool summarizes the conversation and recommends ways to coach employees based on its findings. This way, whether identifying best practices or inefficiencies, you can always drive continuous improvement.
6. The proliferation of omnichannel customer support
Today’s businesses are committed to meeting customer needs, wherever they may be. The only problem? Consumers are using more channels than ever before, especially when it comes to brand engagement. This has given rise to omnichannel contact center solutions, which use technology to manage all communication channels under one comprehensive roof.
Unified CX platforms provide agents with a single interface to access voice, SMS, live chat, email, and social media. This means employees can jump between tasks without skipping a beat. Moreover, thanks to their open architecture, organizations can remove the barriers between disparate platforms, enabling cross-channel data collection.
Why does this matter? It allows you to build more accurate profiles based on the latest customer data. This information drives personalization, which makes for more effective customer journey orchestration.
7. Predictive analytics
The contact center analytics market will reach $8.1 billion by 2031. At that point, many organizations will leverage predictive analytics to their advantage. How? Here are some of the most notable use cases:
- Workforce management: Predictive analytics use historical data to forecast call volumes, allowing you to optimize staffing decisions. They also factor historical trends and employee availability into the equation, ensuring you’re never under or over-staffed relative to customer demand. This can help reduce administrative effort while improving the employee experience.
- Customer behavior: Imagine knowing whether a specific customer is likely to churn. That type of knowledge would allow you to make informed decisions on retaining them, such as by sending them a personalized offer. Likewise, you can leverage AI’s predictive capabilities to estimate their Net Promote Score following an interaction.
- Auto dialing: Predictive dialers are a form of workflow automation that can help outbound contact centers improve their outreach. They place calls even before agents become available, thereby engaging as many leads as possible. In the case of an unanswered call, they move on to the next lead. But, if someone picks up, they route them to the next available agent. This enhances customer engagement while maximizing agent productivity.
8. Advanced digital security
Of course, of all contact center automation trends, none are quite as important as the need for advanced security. Cybercriminals and bad actors are targeting organizations at an accelerated rate, eager to exploit customer data. With their methods getting smarter and more sophisticated, introducing automated protection has never been so important.
When it comes to financial services, such as banking or credit unions, it’s crucial for the customer support team to verify the caller’s identity before sharing any personal or financial information. The conventional method involves asking the customer a series of questions to confirm their identity. However, this approach has two main drawbacks:
- It’s ineffective if a bad actor can access the customer’s personal information and easily bypass the authentication questions.
- It can be a tedious and burdensome process for legitimate users who want quick access to customer support.
Modern contact center solutions offer alternative ways to verify identity without compromising security or the customer experience. With an open architecture platform, organizations can integrate AI-powered biometric authentication tools.
Rather than questioning the customer, they use vocal analytics and/or facial recognition to verify they are who they claim to be. This process is much faster but also more adept at identifying potential fraud.
9. Intelligent routing and call queuing
Routing is one of the most basic contact center functions but also one of the most essential. Manually deciding how to route inbound cases can be slow, error-prone, and inefficient. That’s why modern contact center platforms use workflow automation to streamline and simplify the process.
Predictive routing strategies allocate cases to the most appropriate agent based on predefined criteria. In the case of skills-based routing, you can grade agents according to their talents and/or areas of expertise. IVR systems will automatically route inbound customers to the employee who’s best equipped to handle their type of inquiry.
Similarly, AI-powered tools can also simplify call queue management. Using predictive analytics, they can estimate wait times for customers in the queue. They also announce the caller’s place in line, letting them know they’re steadily advancing to the front. Plus, customers can schedule a callback if they don’t want to wait, which the IVR can place automatically.
10. Continued rise of cloud infrastructure
It’s no secret that cloud-based solutions are becoming more popular. Not only are they inherently more scalable than traditional systems, but they easily integrate with other services. This enables more advanced automation technology, which, of course, enhances operational efficiency.
Better yet, cloud platforms don’t require an enormous upfront investment. Delivered as a service, they help you transform your customer support team into a strategic asset—not a cost center. In fact, according to Forrester Consulting, Cisco’s cloud-based Webex Contact Center can generate an ROI of over 300%.
