The future functionality and capabilities of CCaaS platforms will be largely driven by AI in the near-term. While some vendors are packaging existing technologies as AI (e.g., rebranding natural language as “Conversational IVR”), we are starting to see actual AI application deployment and results in the contact center. The National Bureau of Economic Research states that, “From an AI perspective, customer-agent conversations can be thought of as a series of pattern-matching problems in which one is looking for an optimal sequence of actions.” In short, AI can leverage the contact center’s vast data lakes and recorded/digitized conversations to identify and serve up those optimal sequences in various use cases.
Omni-channel is another CCaaS buzzword that has been around for years, yet we have seen very few true Omni or holistic customer journey deployments. Giving an agent the ability to know if a customer has been on the company website, sent an email, searched for something in the mobile app, or even posted about the company on social media can create an actual Omni-channel experience. As APIs provide tighter linkage between applications and channels, customer communications can be more closely aligned, thereby enabling agents to manage contacts more efficiently and provide customers with a streamlined experience. Omni-automation can also identify the customer’s need and direct them to other, potentially more helpful or robust digital channels in the midst of their service experience – often prior to the phone call ever occurring. This trend is not just about cost savings in the live agent channel; Harvard Business Review states that across industries, 81% of all customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative. To that end, call deflection continues to be a top priority as both a business and customer experience goal.
One of the most forward-looking projections is CCaaS vendor exploration of integrating and partnering with Extended Reality (XR) firms/applications. Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality are all designed to bridge reality and the virtual world. The implementation of these technologies will enable companies to build customer interactions into virtual applications and tools, giving customers the ability to customize their engagement experience for service, sales, technical support, etc. While this technology is certainly intriguing, our projection is that implementation and adoptability will take time. However, we have all watched AI evolve from a buzzword to an actual value-add in the contact center, so to ignore or minimize the opportunities for XR would be short-sighted.
In addition to the longer-term projections, vendors will continue to release functionality that will further optimize predictive routing accuracy; deliver enhanced and more effortless customer self-service options; create increasingly sophisticated algorithms for workload forecasting; identify new use cases for intelligent virtual agents; and find less intrusive and more efficient methods for capturing customer feedback. These enhancements will evolve over time, and some will undoubtedly be more successful than others. But as the CCaaS space grows more competitive and the market opportunity continues to expand, vendors are looking for every opportunity to meet their clients’ needs, both those that have been articulated and those that have yet to be identified.
