Recent contact center trends, such as digital acceleration and the rise of distributed services, have brought new challenges for customer service teams. For the unprepared, the relentless surge of industry and economic demands could easily disrupt communications. You can future-proof your business through contact center solutions and tools with systematic, data-based communications that respond to specific customer needs.

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Essentially, the most innovative contact center practices will use unique customer and agent data in shaping business decisions, which will help you adapt to the ever-changing demands in the contact center scene. Here are 7 contact center trends to keep in mind when working towards a positive shift in your customer experience initiatives this year and beyond.

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Trend #1: Omnichannel Is Here To Stay

Customers have varying preferences when contacting your customer service team. These outreach options range from email submission to social media messaging to the standard business voice call. While multiple communication channels appeal to a broader customer base, offering a unified experience is also essential.

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A HubSpot survey shows many customers find repeating their queries among multiple channels a significant source of frustration. Contact center best practices that unify service channels update your agents with a 360-degree view of customer engagements to track each conversation accurately.

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Market studies have shown that companies with established omnichannel strategies typically keep 89% of their customers. Essentially, jumping to an omnichannel approach helps your business identify and resolve commonly overlooked customer concerns.  

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Trend #2: Contact Centers Generating Revenue

Organizations traditionally consider contact center budgets a necessary component of their operational expenditure. However, recent contact center trends reveal an underestimated revenue-driving relationship. Market surveys show that compelling customer engagement from contact centers can help convert leads and drive customer value execution (CVEx).

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Contact center solutions can drive a significant revenue boost for your company by leveraging modern analytics and AI technology that identify customer trends. AI assistants, like chatbots, can deliver quick answers to simple questions and offer customer support during off-hours.

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Trend #3: The Rise of Hyper-Personalization

Hyper-personalization has become an emerging priority among leading contact centers. The tailored process expands upon standard customer personalization. With hyper-personalization in effect, your team can consistently provide relevant responses to customer needs based on real-time user data. Essentially, hyper-personalization strategies guide your contact center through detailed nuances of customer behavior to deliver highly targeted services and products.

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An advanced analytics tool, like Brightmetrics™, offers cradle-to-grave reporting capabilities that can supercharge hyper-personalization strategies. Optimized visibility of insightful metrics like interaction time stamps, recorded calls, and wrap-codes empower your agents with the essential details to provide white-glove services across every scenario.

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Trend #4: Analytics Provide Valuable Context

Rather than depending on basic reporting templates or even manual KPI tracking, more companies have sought automated programs for collecting and analyzing data, which refines the decision-making process.

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A reliable contact center solution often includes user-friendly dashboards that make it convenient for your agents and managers to process omnichannel information. Ultimately, unifying customer communications in a responsive and intuitive environment offers valuable context necessary for realizing quality contact center performance.

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Additionally, contact center solutions can implement shared public wallboards that keep hybrid teams aligned while maintaining a consistent customer experience. These boards provide administrators with an overview of real-time system performance and promote effortless resource-sharing across user endpoints.

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Trend #5: Concentrated Agent Empowerment

The aftermath of the recent great resignation has seen increased attention on agent retention strategies. After all, top-performing agents provide the backbone of a center’s overall success. You can keep your best team members engaged by providing adequate training opportunities and equipping them with user-friendly contact center software that drives seamless customer experiences. It is similarly essential to promote a positive work culture that recognizes agent contributions through flexible work hours and incentives personalized according to employee preferences.

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Quality employee experiences (EX) will likely remain a priority beyond 2023, as companies use cloud-based contact centers across remote and hybrid operations. The combination of physical and remote work models supports contact centers by maximizing resources and agent skills and scaling performance based on customer volumes.

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Trend #6: Cloud Communications as a Top Choice

The rise of distributed teams and remote contact centers promotes a growing industry interest in cloud communications. Cloud communications enable your team to maintain secure and reliable customer interactions through a unified web-based interface.

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Additionally, a cloud-based contact center integrates communications and customer data for optimized productivity and documentation. Specifically, remote call center technology follows a hub-and-spoke approach that provides a centralized hub for resolving customer issues with unmatched efficiency. Cloud communications also provide your organization with the flexibility for optimizing disaster recoveries to keep your support team running in top form.

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Trend #7: A Demand for Live Engagement

Today's customers seek more immersive and interactive communication from experienced and knowledgeable contact center agents. Your agents can satisfy customers with real-time engagement tools such as co-browsing or live video chats that deliver instant support with highly visual presentations.

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Live engagement tools can also provide customers with quick and relevant support at every stage of the buyer's life cycle, promoting conversions, engagement, and retention. Consider integrating automated AI features into your live engagement tools, where you can store the data for analytics that can help strengthen future customer engagement strategies.

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The Future of Contact Center Best Practices

While AI and machine learning seem indispensable to the future success of contact centers, they should not replace live, personable agent services. Instead, you might consider AI and data technology catalysts that fine-tune and systematize manual customer communications. Your agents will remain vital in managing the creative aspects of handling customer needs.

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A steady data flow will continue to drive personalized services and sales-driven experiences through a customer-first approach. Also, it is helpful to derive actionable insights from multiple data sources to achieve positive strides in your business. Applying a specialized contact center analytics service, like Brightmetrics, arms your team with the precise data required to strategize and deliver the most practical customer experience for every scenario.

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To learn more about Brightmetrics, click here.

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