As 2024 has come to an end, ContactBabel has looked at the thousands of surveys we’ve carried out with contact centers and customers in the U.S., and made some predictions about what we’re likely to see next year.
Voice is king for customers
Considering that the prevalence of digital channels and self-service has increased so much in recent years, it may be a surprise to see that the preference for the phone channel as the first port-of-call has risen so much, particularly for complex and urgent matters.
The timing suggests that the initial change may well be pandemic-driven (although the 2020 figure does not reflect this, as the surveys are carried out in early Q2 each year before the full impact hit).
Regardless of the reason – a greater need for reassurance, or less opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting in a physical environment such as a store – it should be noted that customers’ preference for the phone channel still remains higher than before, even well after the pandemic has passed. (SEE FIGURE 1)
These findings, and the fact that live telephony still accounts for over 60% of inbound interactions means that this channel isn’t going away any time soon. So how can businesses make it less of an effort for customers while managing cost and efficiency?
Some suggestions include:
- Shorter queue times
- Improve the IVR experience
- Make it easier for customers to identify themselves
- Get put through to someone who can help them first-time
- Resolve the call effectively first-time
- Show empathy
- Improve the audio quality and comprehension on both sides of the conversation.
At its heart, effective customer contact is driven by low customer effort combined with a high level of effectiveness, creating an environment where customers’ requirements are met and businesses’ costs are managed.
…it should be noted that customers’ preference for the phone channel still remains higher than before, even well after the pandemic has passed.
The phone channel is very familiar to most customers, and while queue times are still higher than historical levels, customers feel that this channel gives them the best chance of a successful resolution: an opinion which the contact centers themselves seem to agree with. In 2025, the voice channel will still be the gold standard of customer contact. (SEE FIGURE 2)
AI will mainly be implemented to add business value, not cut headcount
Chatbots and call transcription are the most frequently used artificial intelligence (AI) applications. AI agent assistance, while in place in only 5% of businesses surveyed, has the greatest proportion of survey respondents planning to implement it within two years. In-call sentiment analysis and updating the knowledge base through AI are also expected to grow very strongly.
200+ US businesses were asked what they most want from their contact center AI implementations.
Interestingly, while 25% say that reducing agent headcount is of critical importance to them, 55% said that it is of either limited, or no importance.
In 2025, the voice channel will still be the gold standard of customer contact.
AI is looked upon to be vital as a means to increase the sophistication, accuracy and effectiveness of self-service, and especially as a way to improve the understanding of customers.
The improved provision of information – quicker and more accurate – across all channels is also a key driver of AI implementation.
Improving telephony operational performance through reduced call lengths and queue times is seen as less important, despite the powerful effect this can have on customer experience. (SEE FIGURE 3)
Survey respondents who are currently using AI were asked about the outcomes and results that they had seen as a result.
There is a widespread positive response from those using AI to improve self-service – which is currently mainly from chatbots – and an improvement in queue lengths and response accuracy is also noted.
There is much less use of AI to detect fraud attempts, to predict customer behavior or to cut call durations, and these applications are by no means unanimously agreed to be successful at the moment.
The fact that every survey respondent states that “better understanding customers” is either a “critically important” or “important” outcome from implementing AI is a clear sign that AI is not simply being used as a way to shift customers to cheap channels so that businesses can cut headcount.
The next prediction looks at how the contact center can understand customers so well that they actually reduce the demand for customer contact, rather than just handling the same volumes more efficiently or shift them to other channels.
Organizations use AI to reduce the demand for low-value customer contact
John Seddon uses the term “failure demand” to describe calls that are created by the inability of the business’s systems to do something right for the customer:
- “A failure to do something – turn up, call back, send something…causes the customer to make a further demand on the system. A failure to do something right – not solve a problem, send out forms that customers have difficulty with and so on – similarly create demand and creates extra work. Failure demand is under the organization’s control, and it is a major form of sub-optimization.”
- —John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: A better way to make the work, work
A classic example of failure demand is where emails go unanswered, leading to calls being made (first-stage failure demand). Later, the email will be answered, unnecessarily, as the customer already has their answer or has gone elsewhere (second-stage failure demand). This redundant work will then impact other (still live) messages in the email queue, creating a vicious circle of failure demand.
The following chart shows that more than half of organizations admit that they don’t fully understand where failure demand is occurring. (SEE FIGURE 4)
Redesigning and restructuring the way in which work flows around the organization, putting the contact center at the heart of it, rather than treating it as a separate silo, will go much of the way to reducing unnecessary contacts. The customer ends up getting a better service from the whole company, not just the contact center.
One way in which this can be achieved is to unify and automate the agent desktop through AI agent assistance, bringing in the relevant data automatically, depending on who the caller is and what they want. At the end of the call, the correct data is written to the relevant places, and the correct processes initiated automatically, meaning that the right departments will be provided with the right information, thus reducing the risk of failure demand, unnecessary calls and irate customers.
A failure to do something right…similarly create demand and creates extra work.
This also takes the pressure off the agents to remember which systems to update and how to navigate through them within the call (which causes long delays, negatively impacting customer satisfaction), or in the wrap-up, which risks agents forgetting to do things, and also decreases agent availability, increasing the queue length, and decreasing customer satisfaction.
In cases where multiple processes have to happen in order for the customer’s requirement to be met, automated outbound messaging to the customer, whether by email, SMS or IVR is likely to reduce the number of follow-up contacts that the customer feels that they have to make.
Information on failure demand can be gleaned from analysis of the contact center, which holds huge amounts of knowledge about customers’ views of the products, services, competitors and company. Feedback loops can be established to push information and insights upwards to those who can make a difference in product development, process improvements and customer strategies.
AI-enabled interaction analytics offers businesses the chance to mine huge amounts of data and find patterns and reasons in a timely fashion, and it is vital then to act upon this knowledge, proving to both customers and agents that the business takes them seriously.
Redesigning and restructuring the way in which work flows around the organization, putting the contact center at the heart of it…will go much of the way to reducing unnecessary contacts.
On average, almost 14% of survey respondents’ calls are complaints, and of those calls, 83% are not about the contact center itself (or its staff), but rather ‘failure demand’, caused by a breakdown of process elsewhere in the organization.
However, the contact center has to deal with the fallout, and further failures within the complaints procedure can see customers calling the contact center again and again, becoming more irate each time, despite the real problem lying outside the contact center.
There may also be a blurring of responsibility between the contact center and the rest of the business so that lines of demarcation over where the fault lies can be difficult to find.
There is also a real risk, especially within large contact centers that a single agent does not have the capability or responsibility to deal with the customer’s issue, which may reach across various internal departments (e.g. finance, billing, provisioning and technical support), none of which will (or can) take on full responsibility for sorting out the problem.
To restructure the processes that are causing more than their fair share of problems for the contact center – and of course, their customers – is not an overnight task.
However, with the depth of actionable knowledge that AI-enabled analytics promises to deliver, organizations will develop the tools necessary to understand their customers’ demand for contact as well as which of their own processes are causing the problems.
Optimizing these will benefit the customer while taking pressure off their customer service operations, supporting a better customer experience for those people who do still actually need to contact the business.
ContactBabel’s research into the U.S. contact center and CX industries is available free of charge from www.contactbabel.com/research
