Today’s contact center platforms facilitate fully automated omnichannel customer service, proactive outbound customer engagement, and AI-powered agent performance optimization–but what does that mean for your business?
In this post, we’ll explore the following top 2024 contact center trends :
- The shift from CCaaS to Customer Experience software
- Agent-AI Co-Intelligence for AI-augmented customer service
- Agent-facing features to boost workforce engagement and agent retention
- Leveraging Conversational AI analytics for hyper-personalized CX
From CCaaS to CX
In the past, cloud contact center platforms primarily focused on providing omnichannel communication across voice and digital channels, with a few advanced reporting tools and team collaboration features thrown in to sweeten the deal.
Now, it’s clear that standard contact center functionality alone is not enough to help businesses meet increasingly high consumer expectations. Today’s business software buyers want a truly all-in-one cloud communications solution that provides omnichannel communication, outbound sales tools, unified communications+collaboration features, workforce management, and AI-powered analytics in one place. They’re also willing to pay more for CX-focused solutions: 64% of contact center leaders plan to increase their CX budget in 2024. [*]
As a result, providers have pivoted from offering omnichannel CCaaS solutions to full-fledged Customer Experience (CX) platforms that eliminate the need for excessive third-party integrations or “mixing and matching” providers.
In 2024, Nextiva’s Business Communication and Cloud Contact Center software morphed into Customer Conversation and Customer Experience Suites, while RingCentral MVP became RingEX.
But the CX evolution is far more than a simple name change.
Today’s CCaaS+CX platforms are enhanced with GenAI, Conversational AI, and advanced LLMs that anticipate customer needs and provide fully automated omnichannel customer self-service that improves over time.
Co-Intelligence: AI-Augmented Customer Experiences
When GenAI-powered chatbots and other automated support tools began to gain traction in contact centers, agents immediately pushed back against the technology, fearing “robots” would render them obsolete. Now, the use of AI in customer service is inarguably here to stay–but the way agents and customers feel about it continues to change for the better.
2024 is the year of Co-Intelligence: a term coined by Ethan Mollick that advocates for AI-augmented experiences instead of total AI autonomy and anarchy.
In other words?
AI doesn’t exist to take away contact center agents’ jobs or make it impossible for customers to connect with a real person. Instead, contact center agents can leverage AI to make their jobs easier, provide better customer service, and automate the kinds of mind-numbing, routine interactions that lead to burnout and increased agent attrition. According to a 2024 Zendesk study, 75% of CX leaders believe that AI provides the most value when used to improve and amplify–not replace–agent performance and intelligence. [*]
The truth is that AI technology–and the ever-evolving LLMs powering it–is nowhere near ready to operate 100% independently. Agent oversight is still necessary (as anyone who has ever tried and failed to get support from a poorly programmed chatbot will tell you.)
What does this mean for contact centers?
It means agents can pass off time-consuming “busy work” like knowledge base management, CRM data lookups, meeting notes, and appointment scheduling to AI-powered tools, leaving them with more time and energy to devote to customer interactions. This high-level automation doesn’t just benefit agents–over 80% of consumers say leveraging AI provides an improved and more personalized customer experience. [*]
In 2024, contact centers are leveraging AI to:
- Proactively engage website visitors at the ideal time to increase conversion rates (predictive engagement)
- Suggest optimal agent schedules and make real-time schedule adjustments
- Create training materials from past customer-agent interactions
- Create lead lists, use outbound Intelligent IVR/voicebots in the cold calling process, qualify leads, and automate lead follow-up
- Automatically generate meeting summaries, notes, suggested action items/tasks, and highlights
- Offer omnichannel customer self-service powered by voicebots and chatbots
- Route customers to the best available agent (intelligent routing)
Agent-Centric Features For Reduced Attrition
Given that over 50% of contact center owners cite employee turnover as their top business challenge, it’s no surprise that AI-powered, agent-centric engagement features are one of this year’s biggest CCaaS trends. [*]
To lower agent attrition, over 85% of 2024 contact center leaders say they prioritize meaningful employee experience initiatives like improved coaching, better internal collaboration, and team-building initiatives. [*]
While performance gamification challenges, real-time wallboards, and employee recognition apps aren’t going anywhere, contact center owners now recognize the importance of in-conversation coaching over post-call performance feedback. 62% of CX leaders will start using real-time coaching tools in the near future–and 25% of those leaders plan to do so in the next 12 months.[*]
One of the most popular coaching tools is AI Agent Assist, which uses Natural Language Understanding and deep knowledge base integration to provide next-best-action suggestions to agents. Instead of losing time to data lookups, agents can copy and paste GenAI responses directly into customer chats, augmenting them as they see fit. In addition to AI performance coaching, supervisors can monitor voice and digital customer interactions in real-time, providing personalized agent feedback via chat messaging. Automated interaction scorecards give agents clear, consistent performance feedback and pinpoint exactly where team members need to improve.
In addition to providing real-time performance feedback, contact center managers continue to look for opportunities to give agents more autonomy–especially when it comes to scheduling tools.
Mobile-first, agent-facing scheduling apps let team members review upcoming work hours, swap shifts with other agents, and request PTO. Admins can enable automatic PTO approvals, receive real-time adherence monitoring alerts, and leverage AI to automatically adjust agent schedules based on live metrics like inbound call volume or average call hold times.
AI Analytics for CX Optimization
While live agent coaching and smart assist tools will certainly improve the consumer experience, leveraging AI to optimize support and sales processes is another key 2024 CCaaS trend. Over 70% of contact center leaders plan to increase their investment in AI customer analytics and customer journey management solutions through 2025. [*]
Why?
Because real-time Conversational AI analytics, like customer sentiment monitoring and intent analysis, allow agents to provide a more empathetic, personalized, and effective support experience.
Sentiment analysis uses machine learning, Natural Language Processing, and data-backed insights from LLMs to evaluate a customer’s mood during live interactions with agents. This makes it easy for agents to adjust their approach on the fly, transfer the customer to a better agent, and keep customer frustration to a minimum–all key factors for increased customer loyalty and retention.
Intent analysis tools mine customer feedback and historical speech+text analytics to help you understand what your customers want, what motivates them, and what their desired outcomes are during interactions with agents. Customer intent monitoring also identifies common roadblocks in the customer journey, trending topics in customer service conversations, and patterns in customer and agent behavior.
These insights–especially when combined with in-conversation CRM call pops and omnichannel customer conversation history–make it much easier to optimize both live agent and fully automated support interactions.
CX Platforms Effectively Leveraging Contact Center Trends
2024’s biggest CCaaS trends are high-level speech+text analytics, features designed to boost agent engagement, AI-augmented customer support, and a renewed focus on customer experience optimization.
Our interactive CX and contact center software reviews make it easy to compare providers when it comes to available features, pricing, user experience, and customer support–so you can find the right solution for your business needs.
