Global Survey 2020
Introduction
Today’s lightning speed competitive business environment is forcing contact centers to think outside the box and look for new and innovative ways to attain and retain customers.
At the same time, consumer expectations continue to rise, driven by technology advances and the vast amount of always-on digital channels available to them. In many cases, these digital interactions are outpacing human interactions, driving new ways of reaching, serving, and communicating with customers inside and outside the contact center.
Take a peek
The results of our survey gives us a peek at what contact center decision makers are thinking. What’s important to them and what keeps them up at night. How they’re keeping pace with demands of the business, customer expectations, and technological advances. Take a look at what we uncovered and let us know what you think.
About this survey
Cisco interviewed 700 contact center executives from 7 countries and over 10 industries on their challenges and successes in running a contact center.
All survey respondents either directly influence or are directly involved in the selection or management of their contact center systems.
85% of respondents have contact centers ranging from 1 to 999 agents.
Participating countries: USA, Canada, France, Germany, Austria, Mexico, and Brazil.
Overview
Key findings
Top challenges in the contact center
Top capabilities
Customer experience
Agent experience
Artificial intelligence
Data-driven insights
Cloud transformation
Open architectures
Integrated communications suite
70% view security policy management, enforcement and customer data privacy as the two top challenges in contact centers
Over 90% agree the most important capabilities for a contact center solution are intelligent routing, look/feel of UI, and integrated omni-channel
62% plan to implement a cloud contact center within next 18 months
Over 80% consider BOTS and AI robotic automation to be an important function of the contact center
93% agree that technology is very important in creating a better customer experience
93% feel technology is highly important in creating better agent experiences
90% consider customer journey data analytics an important function of the contact center
94% consider it important to have all their communications and collaboration functions well integrated into a single complete offer from their contact center supplier
Contact Center
The focus on customer experience (CX) is at its all time high, and contact center executives clearly understand the impact this has on the success of their business.
Studies by industry thought leaders like Gartner, Forrester and McKinsey all indicate that how a company delivers goods and services to its customers is as important or more important than what it delivers.
But this is easier said than done. Adopting customer-centric processes, culture, and mind-set to implement and manage customer experience skillfully is challenging to most companies.
Fragmented customer experiences, siloed data, high agent turnover, lack of visibility into customer journey, and poor communications across the business remain some of the top challenges for contact centers in achieving their CX goals.
Whether digital or human, agents are seen as the difference-makers in creating meaningful experiences for customers.
Our study revealed that ¾ of respondents feel that agent experience has a significant impact on customer experience.
Minimizing cumbersome, repetitive tasks, and equipping agents with AI-powered context and knowledge in real-time, empowers them to deliver timely and accurate responses customers expect.
Respondents indicate that improving agent morale and job satisfaction leads to reduced turnover which, as you can see, is super costly to the business.
Average cost to onboard an agent
Between $10K and $20K
Average time to onboard an agent
2 to 4 weeks
Engage with agents quarterly to identify what’s working and what’s not
Top 3 technology issues that frustrate agents
Disconnected back-end systems
Too many applications to use
Cumbersome desktop user interfaces
Top 3 business process issues that frustrate agents
Cumbersome and repetitive tasks involved in closing out tickets
Slow processes due to outdated technology
Too many steps involved in processes
We’re in the midst of some of the greatest technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and its derivative technologies, including machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP).
AI is being used in the contact center to amplify its performance, solving a number of problems, and creating efficiencies by offering new ways to automate tasks before, during and after the customer interaction.
Customers expect to have easy AI self-service options when doing business with a company. Yet we learned from our survey that only 48 percent of contact centers have deployed customer-facing chatbots.
Chatbots, conversational IVRs, and intelligent agents improve the agent-customer experience, helping to minimize agent burnout, while improving the quality of time spent with customers who need help from a human agent.
When a customer has a bad experience, the business should know about it. Data analytics provides insights into a customer’s journey, behaviours and patterns and enables contact centers to become proactive versus reactive in delivering the experiences their customers expect and demand.
We learned from our survey that most contact center business leaders consider end-to-end real-time and historical reporting an important function of the contact center. And many indicate that the inability to track customer journey/history of interactions is a significant problem for the contact center.
Data, when combined with artificial intelligence, provides a powerful tool to enhance how contact centers engage with their customers proactively and uncover the “truth” of how customers are experiencing their brand. In this way, businesses can change those experiences to make them better and more profitable.
Better customer experience
Enhanced agent productivity
However, due to the large investments made in contact center technology and integrations, and due to migration complexity, many are thinking about how, when, or if they should go to cloud.
This trend holds across segments and geographies.
We want to maintain control
We are too invested in on-premises
Complexity involved in transitioning to cloud
Say poor communication across organizations is a significant problem in their contact center
Consider it important to have all collaboration functions well integrated into a single complete offer from their contact center supplier
Having easy directory and chat integration to be able to reach subject matter experts (SME) with a single click
Being able to consult a SME via chat during calls with customers
Being able to screen-share with SME to view information relevant to the call
Agent innovation: Enhance and augment their experiences with an eye on retention.
Journey and sentiment analytics: Leverage data-driven and cloud-powered insights to understand how your customer relationships stand.
Self-service and exception management: Build the business case for new forms of self-service with the understanding that human assisted exceptions will become the norm.
Cisco is a global leader in cloud contact centers, delivering the most complete contact center portfolio, combined with world-class cloud calling, meetings, team collaboration, and customer experience management solutions, and the most advanced audio/video devices and headsets.
Cisco is the market-share leader for contact centers. We’re number one in North America and number two worldwide. We have more than 30,000 loyal customers and more than 3 million agents installed globally.
Our cloud solution is based on Webex, one of the world’s best known, scalable, and reliable cloud platforms. Cisco releases a significant cloud update every month and a major on-prem update semi-annually, advancing our commitment to providing all customers advanced technology and business success.
To learn more visit us at: www/cisco.com/go/cc
