What's 🔥 In Contact Centres This Year?

Howdy Partners 🤠

Put your hand up if it's been an absolute struggle getting back into the swing of things post-holidays 🙋‍♂️

In this week's edition of What's CEXy, we highlight some awesome contact centre trends that we've read about recently.

We went down a 🐇 hole, reading 13 different articles about the state of the contact centre in 2023. The most interesting elements of each article have been summarised for you below - we hope you enjoy ✌️

What's 🔥 In Contact Centres This Year?

The C-Suite Focus Will Start To Shift From Acquisition To Retention

It’s no secret that the focus on customer experience has grown significantly in recent times. According to McKinsey’s 2022 State of Customer Care report, improving CX is now the fastest-growing priority area for customer care leaders; increasing by 19% in the last three years alone.

This is because organizations are slowly beginning to understand how increased retention can have a significant positive impact on the bottom line.

For example, Hubspot recently found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%.

So why do customers actually churn? According to the visual below, it appears to strongly relate to interactions that they have with the contact centre. If this is the case, we expect to see increased awareness & investment into contact centre operations in 2023:

Cost Of Living Crisis Will Increase The Need For Human Interaction

Delivering exceptional CX with a human touch during the cost-of-living crisis will continue to be a priority in 2023. Businesses must be cognisant of the fact that customers may be struggling – especially in sectors like utilities where bills continue to grow – and they must be able to support this rising number of vulnerable customers by humanising the customer experience.

The importance of agent empathy on customer satisfaction should not be discounted. In a recent piece of analysis conducted by Qualtrics, it was found that empathy beats efficiency in the customer's mind:

Where possible, contact centres should use the customer data they already hold within their systems, such as customer history, to make decisions on how customers are routed and treated on their contact centre journeys. For instance, a customer who is in payment arrears could be routed straight to a specialist debt management team in order to speak with an empathetic human agent, instead of being pushed through an automated collections route.

Speech & Conversational Analytics Will Become Mainstream

Qualtrics predicts that 80% of customer data will be unstructured by 2025.

As such, we expect to see a continued focus on the value of analytics and data in 2023. Using technologies like speech and text analytics gives contact centres the ability to consolidate and interrogate multiple key data sources that drive improved CX. Deeper insights also facilitate business and customer interaction improvements by using valuable interaction data to inform performance, quality management, and other operational processes.

The rise and democratisation of CCaaS software is enabling ‘affordable’ speech analytics. This will allow anyone with a vested interest in customer experience, regardless of the size of the contact centre to understand the voice of the customer, and allow up to 100% call analysis (versus the 5-10% they currently review) in highly-regulated industries such as financial services and utilities.

Increased Focus On EX Will Help Reduce Agent Attrition

Customer experience has been a hot topic in call centres for a while now. But, if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that elevating CX requires lifting the employee experience (EX) with it.

As difficult calls and requests flooded into call centres over the past few years, employee morale took a significant hit. Agent attrition was up by 60 percent year over year in 2021, which makes it harder for contact centres to deal with high call volumes.

Gartner forecasts that organizations that focus on the total experience – the combined customer and employee experience – will surpass competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both areas.

In 2023, we expect that employee development and career pathing will serve as a powerful retention tool. By encouraging managers to become actively involved in employee development and career growth, they’ll help employees fulfil their sense of purpose – and they’ll see a future in your organization.

Contact Centres Will Become A Valuable "First Party Data" Hub

In light of more restrictive rules around data privacy (particularly regarding third-party cookie deprecation), businesses will come to understand that the contact centre is their best source of first-party data.

At every touchpoint along the customer journey, the customer is telling the business exactly what works and what doesn’t; what they like and what they don’t like.

Organizations therefore need to harness the information they can extract from these customer interactions, understanding the context of the statement in which it was given – and then act on that input.

Ultimately, all that information will help the business deliver a more personalized and better-quality service to its customers over the next year and beyond.

Voice Interactions Will Still Reign Supreme In 2023

Despite a rise in digital interactions, the phone call still holds a special place in consumer hearts. In fact, 32% say the phone remains their preferred channel.

Voice is also the heavily favored choice for frontline agents tasked with handling complex issues; with 81% choosing it as their preferred method.

With the popularity of Voice remaining strong, it’s increasingly important for organisations to invest into speech analytics, allowing them to uncover deep insights around the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of these interactions. McKinsey recently published a full article on the value of speech analytics.

With that being said, providing omni-channel options to customers will still be important in 2023. Research shows that businesses with omni-channel customer engagement retain 89% of their customers.

As per the below graph, different scenarios warrant different levels of engagement. For simple interactions, self-serve & less intrusive channels are desired. For more complex interactions, a phone call still appears to reign supreme!

Proactive Customer Service Will Begin To Gain Momentum

2023 will see an ongoing march towards proactive customer engagement interactions outnumbering reactive customer engagement interactions. This article claims that proactive engagement will overtake reactive engagement by 2025.

With this being the case, organizations need to consider having a dynamic, highly personalized approach when building a strategy around this kind of outreach.

But we don’t necessarily expect proactive engagement to run smoothly from the beginning. In a recent survey conducted by Gartner, it was found that proactive service creates a better customer experience for B2B and B2B customers however it also found that a large majority of customers contacted the company after receiving the proactive outreach, driving more cost to the business.

If the proactive customer service provided is misleading or ambiguous in any way, it’s likely that it will drive more traffic to your contact centre.

Customer Service Will Enter The "Phygital" World

In 2023, one of the latest customer experience trends will see investment in semi-virtual & virtual environments like the Metaverse.

This technology, which at first was mainly used in video games and social networks, is starting to enter the world of customer relations. Users of the metaverse can work, play, interact socially and even conduct transactions. It is truly a parallel virtual world accessible through 3D interactions.

According to Gartner, 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education, social life and/or entertainment by 2026. In the context of customer relations, an agent will be able to meet a customer in the metaverse via avatars to handle requests.

A similar trend is expected for Augmented Reality (AR). According to the Retail Perceptions report, 71% of consumers admit that they would buy more often from brands if they offered augmented reality.

It will take time for customer services departments to fully adapt to customers needs within the metaverse and across other augmented reality use cases however, this is likely something that will begin to evolve in 2023.

Single Screen Technology Will Solve The Multiple System Dilemma

It is not uncommon for customer service agents to have to navigate between 5-6 different systems in the same day to manage their customers. This is due to the wild evolution of different contact centre platforms, all seemingly serving a purpose of increasing agent productivity.

The irony here is that the more platforms one uses to boost productivity, the less productive they actually become. Contact center workers are certainly no exception to this, with over 70% of agents ranking the navigation of multiple tools as their number one productivity challenge:

To combat the above problem, we anticipate that 2023 will see the emergency of a new type of technology known as the single contact centre screen. This single platform will enable agents to log-in to one platform which directly integrates each system into a single view, leveraging APIs and webhooks to achieve this.

Teams Will Learn How To Do More With Less

Expected economic downturns will impact contact centre budgets, forcing teams to increasingly utilise AI and automation across multiple functions in the contact centre to support operations and deliver exceptional CX.

Automation and AI technology, like chatbots that encourage customer self-service, will not only alleviate pressure on the contact centre but also enable customers to more efficiently and effectively resolve their queries and meet their requirements for multi-channel CX.

Gartner predicts that, by the year 2026, conversational AI technologies - including chatbots and IVR - will reduce agent labor costs by $80 billion. This does not mean that Agents will lose their jobs; it just means that they will be utilised in different manners; most likely dealing with more complex scenarios which require empathy that technology cannot provide.