The digital world is constantly evolving, and contact centers are working hard to keep pace. However, a significant misconception about CX technology in a contact center is that it replaces human agents. Human agents remain crucial as they excel at expressing empathy with frustrated customers, resolving complex issues, and building rapport. Technology empowers agents by automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time customer data, ultimately leading to a better customer experience.
This formula of technology-enhanced customer service provides a distinctive competitive asset to customer-centric companies. With this in mind, what technology strategies are contact centers implementing through their digital channels to meet customers’ evolving needs and streamline their operations? AdviseCX stays current with the latest trends to help our clients implement the best contact center technologies. We’ve summarized some of them here and organized them into three categories.
Providing Multi-Channel Communication
Chat and Messaging
Live chat features on websites and apps allow for real-time conversations between agents and customers, while SMS messaging offers a convenient way to answer simple inquiries and deliver updates. WhatsApp and WeChat are growing in popularity as preferred communication channels among customers.
Social Media Listening and Engagement
Businesses continue to connect directly with customers and provide customer service through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (X). These channels are also a treasure trove of customer feedback that companies should utilize. Advanced social listening tools provide companies with invaluable insights and help:
- Hear customer sentiment
- Inform product development and marketing campaigns
- Address customer concerns proactively
- Gain competitive intelligence
Video Chat
The term “video contact center” refers to call centers that have enabled video chat as a customer contact channel. Increasingly more businesses are leveraging video chat to replicate in-store experiences or elevate virtual customer service. Video chat enables:
- Stronger rapport between agents and customers
- A greater understanding of customers’ needs
- Faster resolutions
- Visual demonstrations
- Competitive advantage
- Fewer brick-and-mortar locations
Omnichannel Support
Contact centers are striving to create a seamless experience where customers can switch between channels (phone, chat, email) during an interaction without losing context. An omnichannel contact center platform integrates all of these communication channels into a single system, facilitating seamless sharing of information between channels. It would make a great addition to any customer-centric company’s tech stack.
Enhancing Self-Service Options
Salesforce research shows that high-performing organizations are much more likely than underperformers to provide self-service tools like knowledge-powered help centers, customer portals, customer communities, and AI-power chatbots. These avenues allow customers to solve some issues independently, and a focus is on enhancing contact center technologies that enable them to do so.
Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Whereas chatbots are known for handling simple and routine support, intelligent chatbots are moving beyond basic FAQs to handle complex inquiries and even resolve customer issues entirely. Natural language processing (NLP) continues to advance in its understanding of customer intent, equipping virtual assistants to provide personalized support across various digital channels.
Optimizing the Customer Experience
Artificial Intelligence and Automation
77% of agents report increased and more complex workloads compared to just one year ago, and 69% report difficulty balancing speed and quality.
AI is here to help: it can generate summaries, reports, service responses, and even knowledge articles, equipping agents with a unified view of customer interactions and enabling them to provide effective support.
AI can also analyze customer conversations to understand sentiments, identify areas of frustration or delight, recommend responses, and even predict needs. This real-time feedback allows agents to tailor their approach and proactively address customer concerns.
Performance Management Systems
Customer feedback often provides an incomplete and inaccurate view of actual customer experiences. Predictive analytics, machine learning, and big data can help companies overcome such limitations. Companies can learn which behaviors yield the best results from performance management systems with feedback loops.
Data Governance and Usage
The volume of online consumer data is larger than ever and comes with significant responsibility for the companies that acquire it. Data management is a critical component of digital transformation and customer trust. IT, compliance, and legal teams should work together to develop policies and guidelines for data governance and usage, and CX professionals should know those policies deeply.
“Organizations that respect their customers through transparent and ethical data privacy practices can forge tighter and stronger connections with their customers.”
–Ronell Hugh, head of product marketing for Adobe Experience Platform
Digital Transformation for Elevated Customer Experience
Overall, contact center technologies are enabling the development of better customer-centric hubs, and businesses are enjoying improved customer experience and operational efficiency across all digital channels.
We can help you keep up with the evolving contact center landscape and discern which strategies are right for your business.
