In today’s digital age, customer experiences have become increasingly important. As consumers, we are becoming more sophisticated about the products and services we use. Chatbots, multichannel customer care channels, voicebots, and other communications can help deliver an exemplary customer service experience. But they can be difficult to use on your own. 

To provide customers with a truly exceptional customer service experience, companies must respond to the voice of their customers no matter where they are located. Companies looking to improve their customer experience can now be a part of the next wave of call centers. 

The future of contact centers will bring increased call volumes, a shift to remote work, a lack of relevant analytics, and employee burnout. Below, we highlight our five predictions for the call center of the future.

1. Call Center Experiences Will Be Expected to Be Better than Ever

As data is collected more quickly than ever before, people are looking for incredible customer experiences in return. If you fail to provide a seamless client journey, customers will be less inclined to do business with you. A recent survey revealed that 90% of customers value immediate responses more than anything else when they have a question.

Almost 75% of customers want customer service to be able to see previous contacts and transactions. Despite this, more than half of customers believe their agents rarely or never have the information they need to handle their problems effectively. Your company risks losing customers if it does not offer them a seamless experience that provides an agent with the knowledge to address customers without knowing about their past history.

2. Seamless Customer Experiences Will Grow in Call Centers

The majority of consumers accept that companies collect more data from their customers than ever before, so they expect that companies already know why they're calling. You might be wondering if this is possible with your contact center. There are contact center solutions that can help you predict caller intent and cater to it. 

A true omnichannel experience was the inspiration behind the Voximplant Kit's development. It supports the most popular social channels out of the box, including Whatsapp, Viber, Telegram, Facebook Messenger. You can receive SMS from customers, and a web chat option can be added to your website quickly. Your agents are able to dispatch calls and messages according to their skill sets and other considerations with a single queueing and routing system. Additionally, Kit easily integrates with existing data sources and pulls necessary information in real time, allow agents to have a clear picture quickly. 

3. Automated QA Will Boost Efficiency At Contact Centers

Since call centers have been considered costly with tightly controlled budgets and strict guidelines, they were slow to adopt automation compared to other areas of a company's operations. In order to meet data and automation demands, call centers tend to rely on out-of-date on-premises equipment. Approximately half of call center managers believe their contact center technologies are not sufficiently automated. You may be able to differentiate yourself from the competition by using automation in 2022.

A modern contact center's quality assurance processes are time-consuming and challenging. It is necessary for quality assurance to personally listen to your phone calls in order to assess their quality. Additionally, this procedure is time-consuming and easy for people to make mistakes. Moreover, QA teams can only evaluate a tiny percentage of calls, creating inaccuracies such as listening to your best agents on their bad days or your worst agents on their good days.

Companies are automating and scaling quality assurance by leveraging conversation intelligence solutions such as Voximplant. Using the Voximpant Kit, different call channels can be recorded & saved to a file for compliance and analytics. Additionally, it can save call transcripts in text format based on speech-to-text algorithms. You will ensure you are making accurate judgments based on all your calls, not a small sampling.

4. Optimize Customer Satisfaction with Intent-Based Call Routing

Most contact centers fail to meet the expectations of their customers before they even reach out to an agent, and customers have more expectations than ever. 

Recent research found that 76% of customers expect personalization at every stage of the customer experience, from sending recommendations to knowing the purpose of their calls. Nonetheless, 83% of consumers are asked to repeat the same information to more than one representative

If you don't direct callers to the correct agent at the first attempt, you are setting them up for a terrible experience. As a result of this, you will have a harder time acquiring their business and gaining their loyalty.

Innovative call centers are intelligently routing each phone call to the most qualified agent in 2022 to surpass customer expectations. With tools like Voximplant's Kit, you can track the intent behind previous interactions that drive each call and automatically forward it to the most suitable agent. For instance, calls from the billing number are forwarded to accounting, and those from a customer service line are forwarded to the customer service team. The use of intelligent call routing in call centers is expected to increase in 2022 to reduce hold times and transfer times and increase customer satisfaction. With Voximplant, free speech recognition means best in class intent-based call routing technologies. 

5. The Future of Contact Centers Will Be Cloud-Based and Remote

Remote call centers require planning, preparation, and - most importantly - cloud-based tools. A cloud-based system is crucial to route calls, score calls remotely, track agents' performance in real-time, and provide agent coaching. 

Your employees will have access to everything they need to perform their jobs when your cloud-based infrastructure is in place, and you'll have the insight you need to help them succeed. You'll reap even more rewards as a result. Because you can recruit across time zones, you will have more satisfied employees, lower turnover costs, and a higher level of talent.

Reasons Why Contact Centers are Moving to the Cloud

Customers expect companies to deliver exceptional service, find ways to gain their loyalty, and meet escalating expectations. As a result, companies are moving their call centers to the cloud, enabling customer service agents to reach customers wherever they are, at any time. 

The contact center as a service (CCaaS) is an online software model that is hosted and managed by a provider. Cloud-based contact centers enable contact centers to respond quickly to changing customer and agent needs. Through them, companies gain flexibility, stability, and greater visibility into how their customers are experiencing their services. 

Easy scalability

With a cloud-based contact center platform, you can extend operations rapidly and seamlessly without requiring additional hardware. Businesses can scale on-demand with cloud solutions to handle seasonal peaks, crises, service disruptions, or other workload fluctuations, compared to on-premises solutions, which are intended for a certain number of agents that must not be exceeded.

Anyone with a basic understanding of contact centers can configure and administer Voximplant Kit in 30 minutes. Using Kit allows for the quick and easy creation of call centers with a drag-and-drop interface. Managers and supervisors can modify the service to suit their needs so that it is more responsive to their needs as the business grows.

Moreover, Voximplant provides a set of management APIs for developers that allow you to oversee and manage skills-based queues from your own servers. With the  Voximplant Platform product,  Developers can also take advantage of Voximplant’s SDKs to integrate your contact center operations into your iOS, Android, or web app. These SDKs feature client authentication, call control, and device involvement in audio, video, and messaging sessions to help your agents and staff take calls from your customers. 

Cost-effective solution

Since CCaaS providers host and manage the infrastructure components, contact centers can eliminate significant overhead costs and shift budget to add new capabilities, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and omnichannel. 

Contact centers can also benefit from cloud-based platforms by paying only for what they use instead of overpaying for on-premises solutions that are designed for maximum capacity. Traditional contact center infrastructure often requires costly professional services contracts and specialized programming. 

Flexible operational approach 

With the ongoing pandemic pushing a major change in how individuals desire to work remotely, many contact centers are recognizing the benefits of a flexible work model. They are effectively expanding their talent pools while also lowering their real estate costs.

Cloud computing allows agents to access software and tools from any device, regardless of location. Agents and employees can combine cloud-based contact centers with CRM tools such as Salesforce and Zendesk. We deploy the Voximplant Kit across fourteen data centers and public cloud providers on five continents. To ensure your agents and customers are protected against outages and impairments, each data center relies on a specific cloud provider. 

Management made simpler 

Agents can also deploy self-service options to clients faster when using a cloud-based contact center. Through chatbots, voicebots, and interactive voice response (IVR), customers can get answers to common questions, conduct transactions, and check account balances without needing to talk to a live agent. As a result, agents have more time to devote to customer cases.

Simplified workflows

Contact centers play a key role in providing customers with information on problems, complaints, negative reviews, and frequently asked questions, which helps improve offerings and services. Trying to answer each question is the most time-consuming aspect of contact center operations. 

Voximplant's built-in AI engines help agents work more efficiently by directing high-priority inquiries to live agents. Thanks to the embedded smart IVR network, which identifies 80 different languages and conducts natural language processing, the speech bot can converse with callers in their own voice. 

Choosing the right IVR voice for your firm will help give it a distinctive sound. There is a range of male and female voices that can give your brand a distinctive sound, including Google Cloud Text to Speech and IBM Watson. Our NLP services run on Google Dialogflow, a leader in the voice bot market. With the same technology that powers Google Assistant, you can provide your clients with natural virtual agent interactions.

Faster deployment

To stay relevant in a market that is highly competitive, businesses need to be able to launch new services quickly. A cloud-based contact center is a great way to quickly deploy new features and services, but their intuitive interfaces also make them easy for staff and agents to learn.

Cloud-based platforms enable contact centers to implement new features more quickly than on-premises solutions. You can install your complete contact service on-demand via the cloud with Voximplant Kit in less than 10 minutes. Administrators can create an account on the portal, set up supervisors and agents, and configure phone numbers, among other settings. Having configured your call flows, you can begin receiving calls immediately.

It's Time to Move to Cloud-Based and Remote Contact Centers

More and more companies are realizing that customers want to communicate with customers quickly, easily, and whenever they need it. Cloud-based call centers make all this possible, so it seems clear that the call center industry will grow larger in the coming years. 

A contact center solution like Voximplant Kit could be exactly what you need to offer your customers the leading edge customer care they deserve. Allowing your customers to connect with you will make them feel connected, no matter how far away they are or how large your company is.With the Voximplant Platform product by using APIs and SDKs you can integrate with apps to create a seamless process that helps even during busy periods. Their software allows you to make an impression on your customers - and make them love you for it.