Since the pandemic hit us, the contact center sector has experienced a flurry of ups and downs. Although many firms began operating "as before," many lacked the knowledge of what reemergence should entail. 

Even now, against the backdrop of "the great resignation," uncertainty looms huge. A new value on employees and a revised understanding of the value they contribute to firms are therefore inevitable given the worldwide talent shortage that results from them.

Utilize AI In Interactions With Customers 

Businesses that can successfully lead their clients through their journey will provide the best possible customer experience. The mining of client insights is accelerated by the use of artificial intelligence.

Consumer journey analytics powered by AI aids companies in highly accurate customer behavior forecasting. By automatically allocating the appropriate conversation to the appropriate personnel, you may use predictive analytics to gain insightful information that will improve the customer experience.

Following are some ways that detailed customer insights can benefit businesses:

• To ascertain the resources needed by your company
• To determine whether product rollouts will succeed at the designated times
• To understand the kind of adjustments needed to improve dialogue

With chatbots that use AI, you can answer your customers more quickly. Chatbots can serve as the initial point of contact for 24/7 client involvement and advanced dialogue filtering. The human agent takes over the discussion and provides in-depth support.

IVR & Voice Bots With AI

Even though an IVR system's lack of human interaction may seem impersonal, when integrated with AI, it can help solve issues and offer superior customer care whenever needed. The future of contact centers has been altered by AI, which increases the significance of IVR.

Artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses fields like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning approaches, which comprehend statements rather than just offering the user a menu of options. An AI system may produce an entirely different result from a predetermined input based on what it has learned through probability calculations.

IVRs could be replaced in some ways by voice bots or voice assistants. Voice bots will make it simple to recognize voice commands and answer questions both orally and textually. The development of speech bots can supplement natural conversation and information gathering since speaking and listening are the two primary components. The next stage of AI-based interactions that can be incorporated into contact center trends will be this.

The annoying "Press 1 for sales" or "Press 2 for customer support," followed by a queue, that negatively affects contemporary contact center customer service encounters is eliminated by AI, improving the caller experience.

Align Customer Experience (CX) With Employee Experience (EX)

The customer experience has long been a popular topic in call centers. The pandemic did, however, teach us that improving CX necessitates improving employee experience (EX) along with it.

Employee morale suffered significantly over the previous few years as a result of the influx of challenging calls and requests into call centers. In 2021, agent attrition increased by 60% year over year, which only makes it more difficult for contact centers to handle high call volumes.

Contact center managers must work diligently to raise EX to combat this attrition. According to Gartner, companies that prioritize the overall experience—the combined customer and staff experience—will outperform rivals in terms of satisfaction indicators in both categories by 25%.

Prioritizing employee satisfaction in all operational and technological decisions will benefit CX in 2023, according to Cyara.

>>> Read more: What is IVR? Its definition & benefits

Sentiment Analysis

What sets a competent salesperson apart from a great one? It's their capacity to understand clients. Because a great salesperson understands how to read the customer's emotions and convince them to purchase a good or service.

Sentiment analysis and other voice-based technologies are like giving everyone of your agents a top salesperson to help them better understand their clients. Agents can assess whether the data has a positive, negative, or neutral tone with the help of the cognitive skills of AI technologies like ML and NLP.

Agents would have access to all the context they require to communicate with customers as AI advances in the contact center sector, putting an end to the irrelevant emails, advertisements, and messaging that currently target consumers and refocusing attention only on the customer experience. 

Sentiment analysis provides useful insights into the complex and contextual tone of the customer's speech by continuously monitoring the consumer pulse through AI algorithms, resulting in quicker remedies.

Omnichannel Communication

The trend of omnichannel communication is not entirely new. The fad has developed with time, and it is now the distinguishing factor that separates proactive brands from their competitors' reactive counterparts. How crucial is omnichannel communication then?

Nowadays, almost all consumers own multiple devices. Additionally, customers detest being limited to a single communication channel or touchpoint. They long for the flexibility to engage with a business wherever they are—on social media, in live chat, over the phone, via SMS, and more. Omnichannel communication is useful in this situation since clients, regardless of the channel they use, deserve a tailored and consistent experience.

StringeeX Contact Center Software provides omnichannel communication to help businesses engage with customers via various channels:

• Voice calls
• Video calls
• SMS
• Live chat
• Email
• Social media

Businesses with this platform can leverage diverse channels to create multiple touchpoints with customers. Thus, businesses can bring better customer experience. 

Final Thoughts

Contact centers will become more data-driven and predictive in the future. The operations and communication ecosystem of contact centers will probably be impacted by new technological developments. The key forces behind advancements in call centers will be the emergence of voice bots, intelligent IVRs, and chatbots.

The contact center trends emphasize using live engagement and AI technology to serve and engage clients. With the use of innovative tools and data-driven intelligence, call center executives and agents will be better able to automate jobs and increase both agent and customer satisfaction.