The Future of the Call Center: Predictions for 2024 and Beyond
The customer service landscape is in the midst of a massive transformation, driven by advancements in technology and changing consumer expectations.
According to data from Accenture, U.S. businesses collectively lose $1.6 trillion each year because of poor customer service. On the flipside, since customers are willing to pay a 16% price premium with companies that deliver great customer experiences, smart organizations are doing everything they can to ensure that customers are happy every time they engage with their brands.
Since contact centers are often the first line of defense in the realm of CX — customers usually call to express concerns or have their problems addressed, not to sing the organization’s praises — there’s perhaps nothing more important for an organization’s bottom line than optimizing contact center operations and ensuring every interaction is a productive and positive one.
To do that, organizations need to start thinking about what the future of call centers looks like and take proactive steps to ensure they can keep pace — or, better yet, get there before their competitors do.
At Level AI, we’re all about helping organizations unlock the full potential of their contact centers with powerful, purpose-built solutions designed to help agents deliver the best service possible every time. As we look ahead to the future of call center operations, several trends and predictions are shaping the way businesses engage with their customers.
Trend #1: Generative AI will provide greater automation and better business outcomes
One of the most prominent trends in the future of call centers is the greater role generative AI is playing when it comes to automating and streamlining operations. This trend is set to revolutionize contact center operations in myriad ways.
Since generative AI is capable of quickly solving customer inquiries with human-like responses, customer satisfaction levels increase. This, in turn, improves the chances customers continue supporting your brand, since 90% of customers who are highly satisfied are likely to continue doing business with a company.
Additionally, by deploying AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants, organizations can handle a larger volume of calls at the same time, ensuring that customers receive prompt assistance without long wait times. By using generative AI to handle recurring inquiries and also equipping agents with generative AI tools that help them solve problems faster, contact centers can cover more ground in less time, with less frustration — much to the delight of customers and agents alike.
Plus, generative AI tools are available 24/7 and can auto-score 100% of your organization’s custom scorecard across channels, at near-100% accuracy. Unlike human agents who require breaks and rest, AI-powered systems can provide round-the-clock support, enhancing accessibility for customers across different time zones and enabling them to find the answers they’re looking for at the most convenient times, even if that’s 3 a.m.
Further, AI-driven interactions ensure consistency in customer service delivery across channels, minimizing errors and discrepancies that can occur with human agents. Today, customers expect seamless experiences across channels. Yet according to Gartner data, 62% of customer service channel transitions are “high-effort” — leading to worse customer experience outcomes. Generative AI tools can help bridge the gap here by providing consistency.
By automating repetitive tasks, businesses can reduce their reliance on human agents for routine work, which decreases costs while enabling agents to focus on higher-level tasks — which has the added bonus of increasing engagement. Plus, AI algorithms can extract valuable insights from unstructured data, making it easy to identify trends, anticipate customer needs, and make data-driven decisions to continuously improve overall performance.
Add it all up, and generative AI tools have the power to transform contact center operations, setting the standard of what customer service looks like.
Trend #2: AI-powered contact center QA solutions will earn their keep
While AI-powered QA solutions can provide scores and insights, not all of them are able to back up each score with AI-generated reasoning and evidence to ensure trust and transparency. Businesses that truly wish to deliver the strongest customer experiences possible will increasingly deploy AI solutions that attach evidence to each score, enabling them to stay on top of CX without investing countless hours of time.
Leading AI QA systems can analyze all calls and provide evidence, including quotes from interactions, to justify scores and assessments. At the same time, they can also generate smart summaries of each interaction, enabling contact center managers and QA teams to quickly gauge agent actions and customer resolutions without having to read full transcripts.
It’s an easy way to keep your fingers on the pulse of customer service without having to spend all day combing through interactions.
Trend #3: AI-powered contact center solutions will solve the data scarcity problem
Without the right solutions in place, QA teams can only analyze up to 5% of all contact center interactions. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to see the full picture of what’s going on across the contact center due to a lack of data.
AI-powered solutions can solve the data scarcity problem by capturing the comprehensive Voice of Customer (VoC) data in a way that doesn’t harm the customer experience.
Contact centers relying on outdated tools often aim to collect VoC data by injecting friction into the customer experience by asking customers to fill out surveys after each interaction.
Leading AI systems capture feedback automatically and seamlessly during interactions, eliminating that friction and collecting VoC data at scale, with near human-like accuracy. Instead of just analyzing a handful of calls and expecting it to tell you the full story, modern AI solutions can cover 100% of calls, even enabling you to evaluate a large volume of interactions efficiently at scale.
Trend #4: AI-powered contact center solutions will provide proactive insights that make it easy for agents to optimize CX
Most contact centers are still stuck in the proverbial Stone Age and are only able to react to data they collect after the fact. Leading-edge solutions, on the other hand, automatically give contact centers proactive insights they can use to identify trends and anomalies in real time and make appropriate adjustments in the moment.
Since leading AI-powered solutions mine 100% of conversations for customer feedback, actionable insights, and sentiment analysis, contact centers understand in the moment how each interaction is going and how they can improve it. Using real-time agent assist capabilities, AI-powered tools offer real-time support to agents, recommending successful behaviors and providing insights for enhanced performance in the moment — all without manual intervention.
Is your contact center ready for the future?
As AI continues to evolve from a buzzword into a ubiquitous technology that’s increasingly integrated into the modern enterprise, it’s apparent that the future of contact centers will be driven by AI and automation.
By embracing these technologies and leveraging their capabilities, businesses can not only streamline operations and improve efficiency but also deliver exceptional customer experiences that set them apart in a competitive market landscape.
To learn more about how artificial intelligence is transforming contact center operations, check this out. Ready to see how AI can help your contact center get to the next level? Schedule a demo of Level AI today.
