Conventional wisdom can be a useful tool (so long as the wisdom has been updated to make up for changes in today’s world). The call center industry has seen rapid and dramatic changes in recent years, with digital customer support turning tradition on its ear. For this reason, practices that worked 10 (or even just five) years ago may be draining time and resources from your company to no benefit.
Customer engagement company Verint and customer experience platform solutions provider Five9, Inc. recently collaborated on a co-sponsored survey that aimed to uncover trends in the evolution of the modern contact center as consumer habits continue to change and expectations continue to rise, particularly for personalization and automation.
The study, entitled, “The Evolving Role of the Contact Center: Putting AI and CX at the Heart of CX Delivery Survey,” found that nearly half of the 250 contact center leaders surveyed said managing an increasing volume of customer interactions is one of their company’s top three business challenges related to customer engagement. The findings also revealed that larger companies (2,500 or more contact center employees) are nearly three times more likely to store engagement data in multiple silos, which can cause a lack of continuity and missed opportunities in customer intelligence. Larger companies also engage with customers on at least four channels, so bringing together the data from customer interactions is more difficult.
Essentially, the study revealed the increased importance of managing all customer interactions from a common, unified hub that allows the business to draw on this data to make it actionable. Unifying engagement data in a single place is the first step to enriching a company’s customer experience (CX) strategies with real-world insights – something that larger organizations must get a handle on to extract meaningful and holistic customer insights.
“Increased customer interaction volume and the proliferation of channels has created a massive amount of engagement data, transforming the contact center from a main source for company and product information into a goldmine of insights into consumer needs, behaviors and customer experience challenges,” says Verint’s Celia Fleischaker, Chief Marketing Officer, in a statement. “Organizational leaders need to find ways to unify and harness this data so they can deliver a more personalized and connected customer experience.”
Edited by
Alex Passett
