In today’s modern world, the latest digital technology has transformed every sphere of work and learning from conventional to technical. Digital transformation can be observed in contact centers wherein the application of the cloud-based approach has significantly improved the customer experience severalfold. Modernization solutions such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) enable organizations to transform a call center into an engagement center with intelligent insights to enhance efficiency. The global contact center intelligence market size was valued at USD 1.07 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5% from 2020 to 2027.
AI and Automation are leading-edge, intuitive technologies for digital contact centers that eliminate mundane tasks and speed up resolutions of customer queries. An AI-powered contact center enables human-like conversations via leading technologies such as Speech to text that accurately converts speech into text with telephony optimized models, regardless of phrasing, vocabulary, or accents in many languages; and Text to speech that converts text into natural-sounding speech in a fluent and humanized form. These contact centers also enable automation via different channels like email, chat, text, and call, resolving the queries in just seconds.
Businesses are expected to exhibit an increased emphasis on providing an integrated omnichannel experience. This reduces customer effort and provides consistent, seamless cross-channel experiences across both live and automated interactions. Even in the current times, several businesses still rely on toll-free numbers to conduct and resolve customer queries. Channel choice allows customers to connect with a brand via the channel they prefer, whether it's voice, chat, SMS, messaging apps, or email with a smart approach. This flexible and modular deployment in contact centers is designed to help businesses elevate their customer service strategy and operation. It is a powerful tool that can reconstruct outdated and inefficient systems.
Targeting and retaining customers through Predictive Analytics in a contact center is another disruptive element which is ought to redefine the business operations in the companies. We are foreseeing predictive analytics to use data, statistical algorithms, AI and Machine Learning (ML), which can help empower to transform existing data into future insights and recommendations. Predictive analytics helps in looking for points in the customer journey where expectations are not met and provides room for improvement. It helps in understanding the customer's behavior in the shopping cycle, creating pinpoint personalized offers, and making proactive strategies based on complete shopper insights. Altogether, it can prove a boon for the customer contact systems.
Furthermore, in 2022, customers’ ability to help themselves without having to connect to a human team member can be achieved through Customer self-service. Recent research shows that this method is so popular that 88% of consumers expect brands to now offer at least one self-service option. Self-service features allow companies to engage with customers outside of regular business hours and on the customer’s preferred channel. In addition to this, Knowledge graphs are another technological advancement wherein, data can be put in context via linking and semantic metadata and this provides a framework for data integration, unification, analytics, and sharing.
Ensuring responses around the clock and eliminating customer frustration is a top priority for the contact centers. Digital contact centers soon will be a completely transformed picture. Today, AI is embedded within every aspect of our lives, from surviving in the post-pandemic world to being future-ready, adapting to conversational AI and automation is mandatory.