What Technology Is Being Used in Contact Centres?

We asked 294 contact centre professionals ‘What Technology Do You Have in Your Contact Centre?’

This article is an extract from our ‘What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now’ 2022 survey report, which was sponsored by NICE.

What Technology Do You Have in Your Contact Centre?

Steps Being Taken to Improve Call Queues

The results appear to show a slight trend amongst contact centres to improve and reduce call queues, as well as provide more avenues for customers to find answers to common queries.

The results show that contact centres having a single queue across all channels increased by 1.6% to 31.3%.

These results could suggest that the contact centres are testing the viability of single queues, and multiskilled agents, in an attempt to make a positive impact on call wait times and customer experience.

The most significant increase is seen in solutions that allow a callback from the queue, which has jumped by 26.9% from 47.6% in 2021 to 60.4%, its highest point in six years, and 19.8% of contact centres see this as something they want for the future.

Last year social media engagement fell by 4.7% to 50.7% as contact centres prioritized other critical channels. This year it rose by 5.9% to 53.7%, slightly higher than the 2020 levels of 53.2%, but still 6.4% lower than 2019’s 57.4%.

The rise of social media engagement supports the theory that contact centres were prioritizing other methods of customer interaction over the last two years but have now started to once again build their social media operating model.

The Continued Rise of Self-Service

The last few years have highlighted the need for contact centres to allow customers to self-serve where possible.

By reducing the volume of customer contacts for simple enquiries by directing customers to self-service options, contact centres can free up agents to handle more complex queries.

At the same time, this allows them to improve customer experience by giving customers what they want, when they want it.

Contact centres using interactive voice responses (IVRs) has risen from 81.5% in 2021 to 86.6%, the highest point in the last seven years.

Continuing this trend, the use of chatbots has increased by 5% to 36.0%, and they remain a popular technology on the wish list of contact centres, with 35.6% of respondents saying this is something they would like.

Similarly, the use of knowledge bases has also seen a 10.4% increase from its 2021 levels of 66.2%. With 73.9% of contact centres now having knowledge-base technology in place, they have the capabilities to give both customers and agents access to answers at the press of a button, and the ability to reduce contact volumes and average handling time and improve CX.

Customer Analytics on the Rise

64.9% of contact centres have now invested in Voice of the Customer (VoC) software, increasing by 1.24% from 64.1% in 2021. This growth may not be much, but it continues the annual increase we have seen since 2018.

Collecting customer data is a growing trend across the contact centre industry as the use of interaction and speech analytics has risen by 16.7% to 28.0% in the last year. Since 2017, this is a 108.9% increase in the number of contact centres using this technology, and we expect it to remain a popular choice.

Contact Centres Look to Employees

Technology that supports and manages employees has seen a rise this year, with those using call scripting rising 10% to 52.9%, and the use of predictive diallers now standing at 26.1%, jumping 33.2% from 19.6% last year.

This rise in the use of predictive diallers follows the pattern of growth we saw between 2017 and 2019, suggesting the drop in the last two years was probably a result of the pandemic.

Additionally, 46.3% of contact centres are using workforce management software, with a further 27.2% wanting it for the future. This 3.3% increase from last year could reflect contact centres looking to make it easy to manage their staff regardless of their location.

In addition, the use of desktop consolidation has risen 2.5% to 37.2%, and although the number of contact centres using process automation has dropped 3.4% to 37.2%, over 40% of respondents stated it was on their technology wish list.

As people management becomes more complex, it makes sense that contact centres have implemented solutions that improve agent productivity and employee experience and are looking at ones that will develop this further in the future.

This survey was done in partnership with NICE

Author: Robyn Coppell