To shed some light on how the customer experience will evolve this year, RingCentral’s Ian Nevin, Director of International Consultant Relations, invited Bruno Teyton, Associate Vice President Networks and Telecommunications at IDC Europe, to share his expert insight. He draws on IDC’s research into the IT, digital and telecoms markets, to highlight the 2024 trends in customer experience.
How do you see the customer experience evolving in 2024?
It’s nothing new, but the trend is only getting stronger: customers are increasingly demanding and impatient. They are hyper-connected and use more and more devices, whether at home or at work. They also spend more and more time on social networks, and are therefore highly informed about brands. But the downside is that this keeps consumers very busy. They have less and less time available, are over-solicited and want more autonomy to find the answer to their questions themselves, at a time that suits them.
The services offered by companies need to be designed around this lifestyle. If they retain “dated” services that won’t be able to keep up. This means they will not only disappoint their customers, but this will also have a negative impact on their business.
Do contact centres still need to improve to meet customer expectations?
With the arrival of AI, we believe that intelligence must be at the heart of modern customer services.
Intelligence is also found in the integration of advanced analytical solutions, which will exploit data and draw useful lessons to improve customer satisfaction and even the contact centre’s operational efficiency.
On the staff side, too, agent profiles are evolving. They are expected to be more responsive, better informed, and have a thorough knowledge of the company’s customer service products, services and processes, so as to be able to make proposals tailored to customer requests. To achieve this, they need access to the right tools to help them resolve customer problems quickly: here again, AI can provide considerable support.
You also need to offer different contact channels for customer service. The challenge is to be present and responsive on the channels that customers prefer to use, and to enable them to choose the quickest and most efficient way to find the answer to their questions. The use of digital channels is clearly a priority: 54% of CX investments in the UK are in digital channels.
Is the cloud a prerequisite for the evolution of contact centres?
It provides a modern foundation for integrating the technologies needed to transform the customer experience. In fact, the movement is well underway in companies, since by 2022, spending on cloud contact centres, also known as CCaaS or Contact Center as a Service, will have overtaken spending on traditional, on-premises contact centres.
They proved their worth a few years ago by enabling contact centre agents to work from anywhere, and they are particularly well suited to the new hybrid working modes that have taken root in companies.
Finally, companies are keen to benefit from the new functionalities offered by CCaaS, such as AI and analytics, to gain greater customer visibility and measure interaction quality and contact centre operational performance.
To sum up, what transformations are needed in contact centres to improve the customer experience?
Our predictions for the customer experience in 2024 can be summed up in 5 points:
- Companies will invest heavily in contact centre solutions to modernise their customer service.
- Contact centre solutions will migrate to the cloud to facilitate deployment, simplify maintenance and ensure platform scalability as part of a secure, unified and integrated infrastructure
- AI will become the foundation of CX to facilitate and empower customer interactions
- AI will play an important role in “augmented agent” and supervision functionalities
- Advanced analytics will enable the contact centre to be more effective in delivering actionable insights into the customer experience
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Thanks to Bruno Teyton, Associate Vice President Networks and Telecommunications at IDC Europe, for sharing his expertise on customer experience trends. To find out more about the program and RingCentral’s consultant relations portal, visit our hub.
Originally published Apr 08, 2024
