Call centers are getting a makeover.

Nine in ten company leaders report contact center self-service investments in the next two years, voice/text analytics usage has increased nearly 20 percent in just three years, and 74 percent of organizations are currently in some stage of development or testing customer-facing chatbots, according to the latest reports. 

Automating the contact center isn’t a new or novel idea. As the de facto hub for all customer anything, the sheer quantity of cases and queries has been pushing efficiency optimizations in the service department for many years now. However, the recent acceleration of innovative AI use cases is giving new life and urgency to the wish for further contact center modernization. 

For 2024, we’ve boiled it all down to the three key themes organizations looking into contact center modernization need to keep at the forefront of transformation: servitization, personalization, and AI incorporation.

It’s all about servitization

Every organization—no matter their industry—is being pushed towards servitization, or the drive to provide more services, experiences, and results to their customer base instead of just mere products. Because of this, the contact center becomes the all-important hub where any customer concerns, questions, and troubleshooting land. 

What makes for mature servitization in the call center, however, is not just having the staff and expertise to handle the number of customer touchpoints during any given brand experience but also empowering your customers to self-service whenever possible and resolve queries efficiently. This means your organization has anticipated common needs, made the solutions and answers accessible, and seamlessly directed customers to it even before they knew they would need it. This is the first step to modernizing a contact center for a more profitable future. 

Personalization remains king

The counter-current to extreme automation is the ever-present demand for personalized, tailor-made experiences for customers. Much can be automated, but if it encroaches on the customer’s experience and sense of one-on-one attention, it will have gone too far. That’s why Salesforce is the perfect solution for balancing automation of the menial tasks and data management while also providing innovative outlets for personalized experiences based on customer preferences.

Just take a look at how the platform has helped government agencies like Veteran Affairs, Chicago’s IT bureau, and the City of Toronto modernize their complex call centers with ease, empowering agents with Customer 360 while also raising productivity immensely. 

Incorporating AI effortlessly

Finally, the dream of an AI-led contact center is within reach for organizations that take of their data management practices first. Generative AI can completely change the way contact centers respond to queries across channels by leveraging language learning for more naturalistic conversation and faster routing of customers to the departments and resources they need most. However, this type of AI use case demands that an organization’s customer data is cleansed, validated, and transformed into actionable insights for the agents that oversee the gen AI technology. If your organization hasn’t already looked into data management overhaul or strategy assistance, it’s high time you did. 

Simplus has been there and done that with multiple clients seeking contact center modernization ready for the AI frontier. Connect with our experts today to start creating a plan for your organization.