I keep a Magic 8 Ball on my desk to help me predict the future. While it has a surprisingly high success rate in forecasting things to come, it hasn't yet been able to tell me what the future will hold for the contact center industry. (It's really more of a "yes," "no," "it is highly unlikely" kind of response structure.) So, to look into the crystal ball of the future, we had to turn to more than 500 contact center professionals in a survey that NICE CXone sponsored in partnershp with ICMI.
The survey revealed new insights into short-and long-term goals and investment trends, including increasing complexity, agent management attrition and a growing need for customer data. The survey addressed contact center professionals working in centers—both large and small—around the world, including respondents from more than 20 countries.
Nearly 70 percent of respondents identified “meeting service level agreements” as a measure of success in a contact center today. More than 40 percent of contact centers indicated they are experiencing agent attrition, and one quarter (25.3 percent) indicated that they were experiencing customer attrition. One major challenge identified in the survey, with 69.8 percent of contact centers, was increased complexity, due to the proliferation of new channels and increasingly multi-channel customers. Less than half of those respondents (32.7 percent), however, had upgraded their contact centers to deal with channel proliferation.
Key findings regarding priorities identified were measure on a scale of 1 to 5:
- Customer satisfaction was identified as the most important priority, earning an average rating of 3.86 out of 5 in the survey.
- Increasing agent productivity and meeting service level agreements both placed at 3.56/5.
- Increased sales and profitability scored 3.35/5.
- Lower operating costs scored 3.3/5.
You can read more in the ICMI authored whitepaper detailing the survey findings, which can be downloaded here.
