Among today’s range of contact center technology options, these are the top contact center solutions for increasing agent retention and more.
When setting priorities for the contact center, leaders across industries have ambitious goals. The majority want to improve contact center employee collaboration, engagement, training, and satisfaction, as well as deliver more personalized and frictionless customer experiences, improve self-service and process automation, and reduce the cost per contact center interaction, according to 2023 research from Customer Contact Week Digital (CCW Digital).
Having the right people, tools, and processes in place is critical to achieving these objectives. In particular, CCW Digital’s 2023 State of Contact Center Technology report reveals that executives plan to invest in contact center solutions to fill in their technology gaps. Even amidst economic uncertainty, three-fourths of companies plan to increase or maintain their contact center investments, according to CCW Digital’s survey.
2023 Trends in Contact Center Solutions
Based on survey results included in the 2023 State of Contact Center Technology report, the top types of contact center technology offerings executives plan to invest in include:
Benefits of Investing in Contact Center Technology
High agent turnover. Outdated, time-consuming, and ineffective agent training and quality assurance (QA) processes. Lack of clear insights into the overall contact center experience across channels. High contact volumes and even higher customer expectations. These are a handful of the most pressing pain points contact centers are struggling with right now, and challenges the right contact center technology stack can help prevent and address.
Some of the main advantages of leveraging contact center solutions include:
- Unlocking agent and customer experience insights
- Pinpointing service recovery opportunities
- Identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities
- Reducing contact volumes by increasing self-service and solving underlying issues
- Replacing manual tasks with automations, such as AI-powered QA reviews
- Strengthening agent training, rewards, and retention
- Improving important contact center KPIs, such as first-call resolution, agent productivity, and cost to serve
Top Contact Center Solutions for Your Tech Stack
From streamlining contact center operational efficiencies to uncovering greater customer experience insights and fostering customer and agent retention and satisfaction, here are ten contact center technologies that offer a competitive advantage.
#1: A Contact Center Agent Engagement and Coaching Platform
Agent performance shapes customers’ perceptions of and loyalty towards brands. That’s why businesses across industries utilize contact center agent engagement and coaching platforms to optimize agent scripts and training in real time based on live customer feedback and instant QA analysis. These kinds of tools are also incredibly valuable for letting agents review customer feedback and ratings about their performance, insights that will motivate team members to understand what’s working and keep it up, and of course correct as needed.
#2: Text and Speech Analytics Backed by Artificial Intelligence
Companies with the most advanced contact centers have replaced random manual QA reviews with AI-powered automated analysis of 100% of customer interactions across channels (email, support tickets, live chat, phone, SMS, and social media) with text analytics and speech analytics. Designed to instantly transcribe and analyze contact center conversations faster and more consistently than humans can do during manual reviews, these analytics enable faster, more complete insights about the contact center experience, information that can be leveraged to improve interactions in the moment as well as:
- Pinpoint the root cause of customer inquiries and complaints
- Identify priority causes of customer friction that should be addressed
- Evaluate customer sentiment
#3: A Help Desk and Customer Communications Management Software
An email comes in and gets assigned to an agent. Then the customer reaches out on social media. While waiting for a resolution, they initiate a live chat session while simultaneously calling the contact center. Keeping track of customer communications across channels is one challenge. Responding to every single message — without letting any fall through the cracks — seamlessly as a team is another hurdle. That’s why a robust omnichannel platform for managing customer communications is a must have for collaborating, assigning workflows and permissions, and keeping track of conversation histories all in one place.
#4: Live Chat and Chatbot Technologies
According to Statista, website/app chat is the #2 channel customers use to contact brands, after email, the #1 choice. Live chat software makes it easy to integrate real-time messaging to your company’s website and app and can also be used to manage incoming and outgoing messages on third-party messaging apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. Many of these tools typically offer chatbot features to automate the process of answering simple FAQs and sharing help desk resources.
#5: Smart Callback Technology
If your customers complain about having to wait on hold — and who among us doesn’t? — then smart callback technology can help. When your contact center receives more calls than your agents can handle, a smart callback system can be deployed to allow customers to select the next best time to receive a call back, letting your company staff appropriately to handle the volume, slash wait times, and improve customer satisfaction. This is an advantage as research indicates that most of us don’t want to be on hold for more than five minutes.
#6: Knowledge Base Tools
If your team is swamped with handling calls, chats, and emails, it may be time to invest in a knowledge base platform. These solutions allow companies to create self-service content customers can review to get answers to questions they may have, without ever having to reach out to the contact center.
#7: Employee Experience Management Solutions
Just as text and speech analytics reveal what’s happening with the overall contact center experience and highlight areas where there’s room to improve outcomes for customers, employee experience management tools can shed light on opportunities to improve the experience for employees so they in turn can deliver better experiences for customers.
#8: Digital Behavior Analytics
Staying on top of incoming customer calls and messages across channels without delays is a huge challenge for the contact center. Digital experience technology can help brands anticipate — and even prevent — customer questions and complaints, reducing the pressure on the contact center and enabling agents to work more efficiently.
Specifically, digital behavior tools like session replay, heatmaps, and form analytics help brands uncover broken or confusing digital experiences responsible for driving up customer contact volume. They can also detect customers’ digital behavior and intent, including their browsing and purchasing history, enabling agents to better address customer inquiries when they do reach out. Based on insights from digital behavior tools, companies can create more effective self-service resources, further streamlining customer outreach to the contact center.
#9: Experience Orchestration Technology
Unlock learnings every time customers interact with your brand, across digital and human touchpoints. Aggregate these data points to create unified customer profiles that dynamically update in real time, centralizing key information, such as the customer’s preferred contact method and past purchases. Experience orchestration makes all of this possible, enabling companies to proactively identify and get in touch with customers in need of support before they reach out to the contact center. These insights can also be used to generate automated recommendations about the next best interaction or experience for customers and about resources and help agents can provide to customers to improve their experience.
Looking to upgrade your company’s contact center technology stack? Meet with a Medallia expert to learn how our contact center solutions can help you create unforgettable customer experiences.
