9 Contact Centers Trends for 2024

Staying on top of contact center trends can keep your business viable and profitable.

Why so?

Because contact centers are more susceptible to fluctuations in customer trends than other businesses.

Up until sometime back, timely support and a multi-touch cross-platform experience were considered the cornerstones of good customer experience.

But, come 2024, these trends are obsolete.

The needs and expectations of modern customers are evolving fast on the back of on-demand and hyper-personalized support enabled by AI, AR and VR.

Agile contact centers realize it’s time to pivot yet again and embrace cutting-edge tools to meet customers where they are with support that exceeds their expectations.

That’s where this list of contact center trends can act as a guide and benchmark to aspire for in 2024 and beyond. Let’s get started.

Contact center trend 1: Blended support

AI for the contact center has been a popular topic of discussion for some time. We will see an increase in the adoption of AI to augment contact center agent productivity, automate quality and deliver more proactive care.

If you haven’t leveraged AI in your contact center yet, the time to do it is now. Why, you ask?

Many reasons.

• By using AI-powered customer self-service to solve routine cases, you empower your customers to self-seek resolutions, allowing your agents to focus more on complex cases, better handle tough conversations and provide thoughtful personal attention.
  
• AI also makes it possible to auto-route cases to best-fit agents with relevant experience. This way, AI-led workforce management can even out workload distribution for all your agents, which reduces the chances of burn-out and churn.

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Contact center trend 2: Unified-CXM with CCaaS

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is an alternative to on-premise contact centers and one of the leading cloud contact center trends of 2024. But why?

CCaaS is a scalable and cost-effective solution that is hosted in the cloud.

It allows businesses to support their customers across multiple channels such as phone, email, social media, live chat and SMS.

But when CCaaS is built atop a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM ) platform, it gets even better. It is then capable of combining customer interactions and insights from multiple channels on a single platform. Armed with a unified view, your business can provide a consistent brand experience to customers everywhere, anywhere.

💡Pro tip: Deploy a robust CCaaS provider that not only ensure seamless conversations but also yield 33% cost savings for your business. How so? Everything from data to context to insights is carried across channels to your handling agents, preparing them to deliver quick, cost-efficient solutions.

Contact center trend 3: Mobile-first solutions for resolution

Only some contact centers can offer mobile-first solutions. Ideally, it would be best if you started by identifying your mobile maturity level concerning security, app development, connectivity and device management.

Mobile-first solutions are one of the essential contact center trends being integrated into organizations by re-envisioning and transforming business processes.

Contact centers that offer mobile-first solutions for resolutions are integral for improving agent productivity while working remotely.

Contact center trend 4: IoT & connected devices for pre-emptive service

There is a marked movement toward adopting IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Recent industry estimates show that more than 10 billion devices were actively connected to the IoT in 2021. This number is set to grow to 25.4 billion devices by 2030.

Agents can access customer data from a centralized repository using any device at any time. IoT can help make any employee the “right employee” for a customer to talk to since they all have access to the same information.

Also, wearable devices enhanced by IoT technology offer agents convenient access to information while on the move, enabling real-time updates and seamless communication with supervisors and colleagues.

By utilizing real-time data from interconnected devices, businesses can swiftly identify and address customer issues, resulting in proactive customer service and personalized experiences.

Contact center trend 5: Automation at first contact

Automation at first contact refers to the implementation of technology, such as chatbots or automated systems, to handle customer interactions during their initial engagement with a company.

Adopting the latest contact center automation trends, such as robotic process automation (RPA) can help automate repetitive and manual tasks in contact centers.

Through RPA, contact centers can significantly reduce the time an agent spends on handling such tasks.

Customer service representatives can easily fetch a customer profile, including details of previous interactions. One of its key capabilities is data extraction, wherein bots efficiently extract pertinent information from documents, emails, or websites, automatically populating databases and forms. Additionally, RPA excels at form filling, swiftly and accurately completing online forms, applications or surveys.

Another vital role of RPA is data validation, as bots cross-reference information from multiple systems or databases, ensuring data accuracy and consistency. By seamlessly executing these tasks, RPA enhances efficiency, reduces errors and empowers organizations to focus on higher-value activities.

Learn more about the different types of automation in contact centers

Contact center trend 6: AI-powered intent tagging and intuition moderation

Contact centers can make use of AI-powered intent tagging to prioritize customer messages that require an immediate response.

Example: Suppose a customer posts a product-related query. This is tagged as an "inquiry" and customer service representatives are immediately alerted to address the query.

With the help of AI-powered intuition moderation, contact centers can route, categorize and prioritize customer queries automatically.

In addition, high-priority queries are marked for immediate response. Intuition moderation also helps categorize messages and route them to agents best suited to resolve them.

In Sprinklr, we use a 9-layered AI engine to detect the intent of incoming messages in contact centers and route them to specialist agents for quick resolutions. Refer to the visual below to see how that happens:

Read More: How to Use AI to Identify Purchase Intent of Your Customer

Contact center trend 7: Real-time conversational analytics

Among the critical contact center market trends, real-time conversation analytics enables contact centers to extract data from text and voice conversations between customers and human agents/chatbots. Assessing customer interactions in real time enables you to discover their behavioral patterns instantly.

This empowers agents with a comprehensive understanding of each customer, incorporating their past data, journey insights and significant trends. With the help of conversation analytics, contact centers can automate the process of actively listening on calls to ensure quality and compliance benchmarks are met. It is achieved by checking voice calls against a preconfigured set of compliance rules.

Contact center trend 8: Automating daily & housekeeping tasks

One emerging trend in contact centers is the adoption of automated guided workflows. Guided workflows are highly beneficial in tackling repetitive tasks, particularly the accurate input of customer information into CRM databases.

By automating this process, contact centers can efficiently send out automated messages and emails to their leads. The implementation of guided workflows not only saves valuable time for agents but also enhances overall workflow efficiency, resulting in improved customer service and satisfaction.

Contact center trend 9: AI-powered sentiment mapping

AI-powered sentiment analysis is one of the critical contact center trends that help determine the emotional tone of a conversation (whether it is positive or negative) between agents and customers. In addition, this process is useful for creating personalized experiences for each customer.

Both voice calls and online chat sessions are analyzed to draw insights in real time. In addition, AI-powered sentiment mapping allows contact centers to monitor agent performance and quality management in contact centers.

How to leverage contact center trends in 2024

As you can see, in 2024, contact center industry trends will be geared toward boosting cost savings and improving customer and employee experiences.

To achieve this, your contact center must invest in remote workforces, security, self-service tools and intelligent automation. Let’s discuss these points briefly.

1. Focus on global distribution of workforce

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare deficiencies in contact centers across the globe. They faced several challenges, such as a shortage of agents, operational issues and more.

One of the ongoing contact center trends has been the adoption of a physical and remote hybrid work model by contact centers across the globe. This ensures diversification in skills, resources and locations is maximized, and contact centers can exercise flexibility when deploying customer service agents for various volumes and support needs.

To empower your distributed workforce, it will be a wise move to invest in cloud-based contact centers. By moving your operations and people to the cloud, you can quickly scale your support capacity without expanding your overhead costs.

You can go and hire the best talent, regardless of their location, affording you time-zone flexibility. Moreover, you cut down on your infrastructure and IT costs.

Most importantly, with your workforce spread across the globe, you get increased flexibility and agility to serve more customers.

Read More: The Financial Advantages of Migrating to a Cloud Contact Center

2. Self-service by default

Gartner has found that 70% of people use customer self-service channels at some point during their resolution journey, indicating that most customers seeking help from a business prefer to solve their issues independently.

Contact centers should aim to enhance their self-service capabilities in the coming year so that at least 50% of inquiries are resolved through self-service channels. Not only will providing more options for people to easily find answers to their questions cultivate happier, more loyal customers — it can also significantly reduce costs for your contact center.

Is Your Contact Center Generating Enough ROI?

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3. Rethink security policies

To make remote work more secure, contact centers are increasingly adopting call center technology trends such as virtual private networks (VPNs), private cloud systems, “dummy” workstation machines, and more. Train your workforce in security measures and contact center compliance

Deploy VPN multi-factor authentication. This is far safer compared to relying only on a password for protection. Two-factor authentication can also help track who has access to sensitive information hosted on cloud systems.

4. Harness a digital-first approach

Organizations that approach customer conversations in multiple channels (across different social media and messaging apps, live agents and chatbots) as part of a single unified customer journey will benefit from this omnichannel approach.

Data gets shared across departments by connecting customer-facing functions (sales, marketing and customer service ). This gives businesses a holistic view of each customer, enabling someone to reach out using their favorite social media channel, for example, and to continue discussing that same issue later over live chat on the company website — without having to explain their situation over again or repeat important details.

💎Take inspiration: Prominent Energy Company Brings Digital-first Approach to Customer Experience with AI

Stay ahead of contact center trends with a future-proof solution

As you would have noticed, AI and automation are the key contact center trends this season.

The future looks bright for contact centers conscientiously working on integrating automation into their offerings to improve customer satisfaction across the board. If you are one of them and want your customer experience to soar to new heights and your agents to become the true champions they are, checkout Sprinklr Service and see what it can do for your business.