UC Advanced caught up with three experts in the Contact Centre arena, Laura Ball CX AI Lead, EMEA at Zoom; Myles Leach, UK Managing Director at NFON UK and Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO at Content Guru and asked them what are the current trends in contact centres, the business problems they’re solving, the common adoption barriers, and the potential improvements that could be made to the current Contact Centres in the market?
Current contact centre trends
Laura Ball, Zoom’s CX AI Lead responded, “Current trends in the contact center space emphasise artificial intelligence (AI) integration, the ongoing shift to cloud-based solutions and omnichannel communication. A recent survey from Zoom found that more than half of business leaders (71%) and 51% of employees spend time each week completing time-consuming tasks, including providing status updates to colleagues and customers. The solution? Leveraging AI-driven tools like smart assistants and chatbots to save time and enhance customer service. Additionally, there is a growing emphasis on predictive analytics and real-time insights to personalise the customer experience, ensuring that interactions are tailored and efficient. The same survey found that 75% of leaders whose teams use AI collaborate better and make better decisions. Businesses are also focused on reducing the strain on IT departments by adopting cloud-based solutions that are easy to deploy and manage. The need to support remote and hybrid work environments has accelerated the adoption of cloud contact centres that enable teams to work from anywhere while maintaining high service standards. An omnichannel offering is becoming the standard for many customer-focused businesses, allowing consumers to connect with agents through their preferred methods – whether that’s voice, chat, SMS or video. These trends are empowering businesses to provide faster and more efficient customer support while meeting the evolving needs of tech-savvy consumers.”
Martin Taylor, Content Guru’s Deputy CEO replied, “We are continuing to see a lot of organisations looking to integrate new channels into the contact centre environment to provide enhanced omni-channel experiences. Although voice is still a very popular channel, organisations are rapidly looking to support additional social and digital channels. Each channel serves a different purpose, with multiple channels being used interchangeably by the same service users. This is imperative as it provides the ability to see a 360-degree view of customer journeys, and exact customer profiles can be seen at a glance. The trend is moving towards the connection of social and digital channels and eliminating siloed solutions that constituted past attempts to integrate channels. The next “trend” will be to try and create a digital experience that rivals the personal touch of a phone call. Accessibility will come to the forefront with impending regulation changes across North America and Europe, with financial penalties of non-compliance by 2025 for organisations that are unable to provide accessible features for visually impaired users.”
Problem solving with the help of Contact Centres
The decision for a business to invest in a Contact Centre or any upgrades and updates on an existing solution are varied, and our expert panel gave some insights into the reasons why businesses are seeking contact centres to maximise productivity and customer satisfaction.
Myles Leach, NFON UK’s Managing Director responded, “Today businesses face the challenge of customer retention due to easy provider switching. Retention has emerged as a critical issue as recent surveys indicate as much as 82% of customers cease business with companies due to poor service. To thrive amid competition and enhance customer experiences, organisations prioritise customer satisfaction and leverage professional contact centre solutions for communication management. Amidst high customer expectations, companies must prioritise prompt resolution without prolonged holds or multiple call transfers. Contact centre operators require round-the-clock availability, regardless of remote or home-based customer service setups. Advanced contact centre solutions not only provide impeccable voice quality and reliability but also ensure compliance and safeguard data security. This comprehensive approach empowers businesses to meet evolving customer demands and maintain long-term relationships.”
Laura Ball added, “Businesses are looking to solve several challenges with contact center solutions, but the main issue centres around improving customer satisfaction. Any customer-focused business needs to prioritise creating a seamless, personalised customer experience across multiple channels, while managing the complexity of these interactions on a unified platform. Adopting AI and the insights the technology can glean into customers is crucial. Natural language processing intelligently detects what each user truly needs and provides the best possible answer, while creating customised flows and messages for unique segments based on a customer’s profile or data attributes. Reducing operational costs and enhancing agency efficiency will also be top of the list for many businesses – which can also be achieved by consolidating their contact centre systems and collaboration tools into one system, powered by AI.
Martin Taylor replied, “An agent can spend over 50% of their time carrying out admin tasks, such as making call notes and summarising interactions. Until now, admin-heavy tasks were seen as just another part of the role but generative AI now has the ability to carry out a lot of the heavy lifting. Adopting modern, cloud-based solutions that unlock the benefits of generative AI is key to overcoming productivity issues. In addition to improving productivity, agents are able to focus on supporting customers, increasing CX sentiment and helping to reduce costly churn and training time.”
Common barriers to adoption
Laura Ball commented, “Adopting contact centers can be hindered by several common barriers, including the complexity of migrating from legacy systems and integrating new contact centre solutions with existing workflows, concerns over data security and privacy, and ensuring agents feel supported during the adoption process. To mitigate data privacy concerns, businesses should ensure that they are only engaging with solutions that comply with data privacy regulations and ethical guidelines. Transparency is also key. Policies for data usage and storage should be clearly communicated with customers and employees to foster trust. There is also a learning curve for employees adapting to new tools and processes. To ensure agent satisfaction and wellbeing, businesses must adopt an agent-centric approach and should consider providing a series of training programmes and resources to ensure they feel fully supported. Finally, ensuring consistent, high-quality customer experiences across multiple channels, particularly in hybrid work environments, can pose significant challenges. Investigating what is and isn’t working in hybrid and remote models is key here. Businesses should regularly check in with their agents, and leverage tools like Zoom Workforce Management to help forecast and predict agents’ concerns to help keep them happy, and ultimately drive positive customer interactions.”
Myles Leach continued, “One significant barrier is the legacy investment in existing systems, which can create a “sunk cost” mentality and reluctance to switch. And another barrier arises from the perceived functionality of current phone systems. If existing systems seem to be working adequately, businesses may question the need for change. Expense justification is another critical aspect. New contact centre solutions require financial investment. To overcome this, it’s crucial to demonstrate a clear return on investment (ROI) by quantifying the benefits of the new technology, such as improved customer satisfaction, increased efficiency, and reduced costs.”
Martin Taylor echoed similar views, “For organisations, the financial justification for moving to the cloud must be compelling, especially considering the significant costs of maintaining legacy systems. Substantial productivity gains from AI can also make cloud migrations self-funding within a short period of time. Geopolitical and economic uncertainties have also historically slowed investment, though this trend is slowly easing. Large enterprises are particularly hesitant about migrating, as the process can be complex, the organisations themselves are less flexible than smaller SMEs, and they worry about jeopardising mission-critical workloads. There are also security concerns, although modern cloud contact centres offer superior security features compared to on-premises systems. Adopting a solution designed to navigate disparate and complicated IT environments can help prevent delays which could complicate future updates. As the cloud is now generally accepted as a prerequisite for AI, barriers are being swept away in the fear of being left behind.”
Harnessing the effectiveness of current solutions
Putting our panel of experts on the spot, we asked what improvements could be made to enhance the effectiveness of contact centre solutions, and they did not disappoint with a range of responses that all businesses with contact centre solutions could, and perhaps should, be considering or implementing.
Myles Leach from NFON UK said, “To enhance the effectiveness of current solutions, companies should consider incorporating a range of supplementary services. Customisation and integration services would empower customers to tailor solutions to their specific requirements and ensure seamless integration with existing systems. By providing comprehensive training and support services, businesses can enable clients to fully utilise their technology investment through training programs designed for agents, supervisors, and administrators. Implementing analytics and reporting services could offer valuable insights derived from customer interactions, assisting clients in refining their strategies and enhancing customer experiences. Security and compliance audits serve to ensure data protection and adherence to industry regulations, fostering trust and confidence in clients’ operations. Proactive maintenance and monitoring services guarantee continuous performance and prompt issue resolution. Lastly, strategic consulting for process optimisation and technology updates can help clients stay ahead of industry trends and maintain a competitive edge.”
Martin Taylor from Content Guru suggested, “To harness upcoming trends in the contact centre, including AI, and the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices acting as digital customers, it is imperative to move to the cloud. The Contact Centre as a Solution (CCaaS) model can overcome fundamental challenges presented by legacy, on-premises solutions by providing rich omni-channel features to suit growing customer demands without requiring expensive and time-consuming hardware updates and getting a springboard to AI. CCaaS solutions also provide high levels of scalability and reliability and a wealth of integrations into multiple underlying systems of record, enabling a crucial 360-degree view of customer interactions. As a result, CCaaS enables an organisation’s entire IT infrastructure to be leveraged more efficiently than ever before.”
Laura Ball from Zoom ended with her thoughts, “To enhance the effectiveness of contact centre solutions, improvements can focus on better integration with existing systems, more intuitive user interfaces and increased AI capabilities for personalised customer interactions. There’s also room for development in analytics, providing deeper insights into customer behavior and agent performance, which can be used to improve the service being offered. Enhancing security features and offering more robust support for remote and hybrid work environments will also be crucial. Finally, simplifying the deployment process and offering more scalable, flexible options can help businesses of all sizes adopt and benefit from advanced contact centre solutions.” n
In summary
Current trends in contact centres are the integration of AI, the shift to cloud-based solutions, and the importance of omnichannel communication to enhance customer service and agent efficiency. Successful businesses are prioritising customer satisfaction, leveraging predictive analytics and ensuring round-the-clock support to meet high customer expectations and improve retention. However, common adoption barriers include migrating from legacy systems, data security concerns, and the financial justification of new investments. Some investments, such as enhancing security features are essential, whilst others are a discussion around company planning for the future and addressing current issues in areas such as hybrid and remote working.
