What Are The Top Call Center Trends For 2021?

Digital transformation is becoming one of the buzzwords in corporate language. It consists of companies adapting to new technologies in the way that best suits their organizational objectives. Although trained agents make for a successful customer service center, call centers are still highly dependent on technology.

Agents and technology must work in harmony to ensure that a contact center offers the best customer experience (CX). Given the need for adaptation, here are some of the top call center trends for 2021.

Customer Interactions Powered By Artificial Intelligence (AI)

As companies continue to integrate predictive analytics, AI will play a central role in optimizing call center experiences for agents and customers. Artificial Intelligence is currently a strategic priority for approximately 83% of companies, and 54% of executives confirm the ability of AI to increase productivity.

How Will AI Improve Call Centers?

1) Understanding Of Customer Needs

Contrary to popular opinion, AI is not intended to replace call center agents. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning help optimize automated processes.

IVR systems work well in certain circumstances, but may not be sufficient. Restrictive outbound calls for individual inbound calls often force customers to settle for options that don’t match their query. However, using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the call technology software will start to make decisions based on similar previous calls.

2) Creation Of Customer Profiles

Thanks to Machine Learning and data collection, it is easier to find the next “best steps” for specific customers. The calling technology software will create customer profiles using data derived from past interactions. These profiles will enhance the capabilities of customer service centers to provide personalized recommendations to users.

3) Omnichannel Call Centers

The unification of contact channels will continue to separate proactive contact centers from their reactive counterparts in 2021. An omnichannel approach encourages call centers to view the customer experience holistically.

More and more contact centers are realizing that while customer journeys may start on one channel, the receipt of valuable feedback and information from users often takes place on different channels.

Unifying customer interactions across multiple channels will help companies solve user problems much faster while identifying more lucrative opportunities for future sales.

4) Analysis Programs

Gone are the days of over-reliance on a supervisor’s manual observation skills to maximize agents’ potential. Today, companies use call center analytics to transform data such as call and screen recordings, text messages, and chats into valuable feedback.

More omnichannel call centers will adopt analytics programs to develop their dashboards with statistics relevant to their operations. Statistical dashboards will allow supervisors and agents to receive real-time updates on important metrics and customer experiences.

5) Cloud-Based Solutions

Cloud-based solutions are fast becoming the norm for most businesses. 96% of companies have used at least one cloud software in the last two years. For call centers, moving to a cloud-based model offers more flexibility when scaling business operations.

Organizations that manage their own hardware and software often end up limiting their growth potential. Cloud-based services allow companies to scale according to the scale of their operations through services such as pay-per-use.

6) Recover Technology

Despite being relatively new, the recovery technology will make its mark in 2021. This message filtering technology essentially removes errors in messages without changing the flow of a conversation. By using retrieval technology, call centers can ensure that their customers only receive high-quality messages.