These 5 Inbound Call Centre Trends You Can’t Afford to Sleep On in 2024

We saw a lot of changes to the call centre landscape. From the use of messaging apps to speech recognition technologies, organizations are now making the most of AI integrated into customer interactions. Today, we share Five Inbound Call Centre Trends You Can’t Afford to Sleep on in 2024.

Digital transformations are encouraging organizations to question their traditional methods of addressing customer queries. And, you have market leaders like Amazon and Uber who are raising the bar for customer experience. Customers with incredibly high expectations now want to interact with an organization through any medium they find convenient.

Organizations have now adopted the omnipresent approach to be available for customers through omni-channels. According to a survey conducted by VI.GA Consulting, 45% of the agents believe that customer expectations have increased immensely, and businesses need to have the right set of contact centre solution and analytics tools to draw connections between words, intention and action.

Given that 45 percent of agents surveyed by VI.GA Consulting think that customer expectations are becoming even more complex, now is the time for brands to act. With the right set of contact centre solution and analytics tools, brands can analyse customer data generated across different channels and use that information to improve customer service.

5 Most Significant Inbound Call Center Trends:

Let’s jump into these inbound call centre trends!

1. Focus More on Online Communication

Right now, call centres focus on communication through email and telephone. However, you need to focus more on online communication in 2024 with more and more customers opting social media to interact with your organization.

This shift towards online communication can be attributed to the Gen Z population, who prefer social media and live chat over phone or email.

With the enhanced usage of online channels, call centres and organizations need to work towards creating omni-channel experience for their customers. And, call centre software can come handy when you are preparing your customer service team for digital transformation. Contact centre software will live chat and social media integration functionalities can help offer a consistent experience to customers digital channels.

2. Increase Use of Analytics

67% of customers mention that bad experiences lead to the churn, making it increasingly important for organizations to analyse the friction points leading to negative customer experiences.

Call centres are increasingly making the use of analytics to understand the impact of their decisions on the bottom line. Analytics is important to determine closely how different performance metrics align with the revenue. By tracking the experience of customers and churn rate through omni-channel sources, you can further identify the friction points.

Call centre software and analytics solutions can assist you in zeroing in on the cause of negative customer experiences. Accordingly, you can make changes in the way you are handling concerns and queries from customers. Customer happiness is directly aligned with your financial power! The more you work towards offering outstanding customer experience, the better will be your performance in terms of consistent revenue streams.

The best service teams go by the mantra that analytics provide a 360-degree view of the customer to the entire organization. It also ebables them to work faster and smarter with predictive analysis of text, speech and cross channel communication.

3. Promote Remote Call Centre Onshoring

Time zone flexibility and flexible working hours have increased the demand for remote contact centre workers. This will continue to a stable trend in 2024 with better use of collaboration tools and real-time analytics. With effective work from policies for service reps, organizations can take their work mobile and understand customer context efficiently.

In the onshore versus offshore debate, onshore is clearly the winners. Customers are willing to pay more to use an onshore service, consider it as a better way to get their queries resolved in real-time. Fortunately, with cloud-based call center software, your organization can manage onshore remote workers and achieve unified communication.

4. Adopt Robust Customer Satisfaction Metrics

It’s time to think beyond averages to asses your call centre performance. Take robust steps towards delivering outstanding customer service with Negative Response rate (NRR) strategy. Rather than measuring the average call time, the NRR strategy focuses on performance-based assessment.

It aims at satisfying customers with positive resolution of their complaints. To achieve this, call centre agents need to acquire strong interpersonal skills and be more customer-driven. Remember that customer satisfaction drives more business in terms of brand loyalty, positive referral and repeat purchase.

5. Artificial Intelligence to Improve Customer Interactions

Businesses are increasingly adopting predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to enhance the experience of customers and agents simultaneously. AI applications are helping customer service reps deal with a wide range of issues with the right set of information at their disposal.

Through call routing and call queue handling functions, service reps can optimize their performance. And then, there are AI-based virtual agents and voice agents, which provide seamless self-support for customer service.

Wrapping Up

These inbound call centre trends have already made an impact on the way customer service reps operate and are likely to attract more waves through the coming year. Need more help in getting a contact centre solution that is equipped to boost your customer satisfaction efforts? Explore top contact centre solutions.

Also, check Free and Open Source Call Center Software for Small Business