Customer Contact Checklist: 20 Trends To Know For 2024

Will 2024 be the year in which you make customer centricity a reality? Will it be the year in which you finally cultivate those happy, empowered agents who can wow customers? Will it be the year in which you develop a meaningful competitive advantage based on the customer experience? Will it be the year in which talk of “silos” and “disconnected systems” becomes extinct?

The answer most certainly can be yes. The technology is available, the best practices are attainable, and the vision is conceivable.

But it will not automatically be yes. We all know from past experiences that the best laid contact center plans tend to go awry. Certain technology does not live up to the hype. Certain business metrics and initiatives distract us from doing what we need to do. Certain seemingly obvious concepts – like customer centricity and employee centricity – can prove more ambiguous than we all realized.

Cognizant of this reality, CCW Digital is pleased to provide you with a checklist for success in 2024. We review twenty of the most essential trends shaping customer contact – and highlight exactly how your organization should respond to ensure it stays ahead of the competition en route to your customers’ hearts (and wallets!).

Trend #1 – Unleash the Power of Generative AI

CCW Tips: Start internally to not only immediately improve efficiency but ensure any inaccuracies and inconsistencies can be addressed before reaching customers. Ensure your generative AI solution is being trained on broad and specific company knowledge. Set parameters for things like managing customer data and providing refunds to ensure AI-generated communication does not introduce new risks.

Trend #2 – Put Service In Self-Service

CCW Tips: Once you have gained confidence in your AI and set the appropriate parameters, empower your chatbots and IVRs to provide real resolutions. If customers know they can get actual make-goods, refunds, etc. in self-service tools, they will be more inclined to use them.

Trend #3 – Augment Agents, But Don’t Automate The Humanity Out Of Them

CCW Tips: Ensure your Agent Assist and AI-driven training solutions do not become substitutes for meaningful coaching and product mastery. AI should free agents from having to look up individual bits of customer and product data during each interaction, but they should still know your products, your customer experience goals, and the “why” behind your official policies. This knowledge ensures they can still incorporate the human touch in their service, especially when the customer’s issue slightly deviates from the traditional script.

Trend #4 – Train Agents Based On Concepts, Not Hard Rules

CCW Tips: Beyond mandatory compliance requirements, agents should have leeway to hit crucial “conversation points” on their own terms. They should be able to weave customer details – like their name and VIP account status – into the conversation naturally, ensuring a more human, organic interaction. They should have leeway to provide make-goods, apologies, and refunds if they make sense based on the context of the situation. They should be able to determine based on call flow – not their AHT measure – whether it makes sense to end a call or engage further.

Trend #5 – Make Remote Work Work

CCW Tips: Remote work is here to stay; 89% of contact center leaders believe the typical agent will work from home at least 50% of the time by 2030. But successful contact centers will not simply accept the inevitability of remote work; they will leverage the opportunity to attract higher-caliber workers, design more agile workflows, and adopt creative staffing models. They will similarly refuse to accept current weaknesses related to training and collaboration, instead leveraging AI, remote team tools, and innovative workforce management processes to ensure remote agents are wholly immersed in the company’s culture and mission.

Trend #6 – Prioritize Agent Effort

CCW Tips: Yes, pizza parties are fun. Yes, compensation can be better. Our research, however, identifies agent effort as one of the top drivers of employee engagement. Indeed, companies looking to boost agent happiness and productivity should focus on implementing easier systems, providing real-time guidance, and using AI to surface relevant customer and product data during the interaction. They can measure agent effort by analyzing factors like “questions to resolution,” “time spent searching the knowledge base,” “number of repetitive questions,” and “silence time.”

Trend #7 – Define The New Agent Normal

CCW Tips: We all love to talk about how “AI will automate simple issues so agents can focus on complex ones.” But we don’t often zero-in on exactly what these complex issues are. When is self-service more suitable for a customer inquiry, and vice versa? Without a clear answer to that question, brands will neither deploy their chatbots correctly nor sufficiently train agents for the evolution of their role.

Trend #8 – Support The Agent’s Transition To “Complex Work”

CCW Tips: The idea of shifting agents from simple to complex work is supposed to be about empowerment. It hinges on the idea that agents would rather engage with customers than repeatedly tell them when their payment is due or instruct them on resetting their passwords. But we can’t neglect the fact that complex work can also be challenging and draining. Agents are not necessarily looking to spend all day navigating lengthy, complicated calls with highly emotional customers. Without surmising ways to protect the agent’s well-being and sufficiently compensate them for this higher-value work, the rise of AI could end up having a negative effect on the agent experience.

Trend #9 – Support The Agent’s Non-Customer Service Focuses

CCW Tips: By definition, there will be fewer complex, unpredictable tasks than there will be simple ones. As such, the rise of AI will almost certainly reduce head count needs within the contact center. To avoid terminating significant percentages of their workforce, contact center leaders are beginning to consider what else agents can do; options like tuning chatbots, reviewing customer feedback, and managing knowledge entries are very much on the radar. The issue, of course, will be determine how to prepare and potentially compensate agents for these additional tasks.

Trend #10 – Stop Accepting Excuses For Integration

CCW Tips: The “single pane of glass” may be a pipe dream for many organizations, especially those in highly bureaucratic organizations. It may not even be advisable; certain agents should have access to more data than others. Engineering employees should receive different product training than marketing specialists. But the idea of achieving consistency — by virtue of highly integrated systems — is not up for debate. All team members require access to the same data and visibility into the same key performance indicators.

Trend #11 – Make Personalization More Productive

CCW Tips: Name-drops are about “showing off what you know.” Real personalization is about showing a customer a great experience based on what you know. Use your recognition of the customer to streamline authentication and issue qualification, and use your predictive intelligence about what the customer wants to provide faster and more relevant resolutions.

Trend #12 – Make Proactive Communication More Personal

CCW Tips: There is fine line between proactive engagement and spam, and many brands find themselves on the wrong side. Moving forward, make sure you are using actionable intelligence to deliver the right message to each customer in their preferred channel, at their preferred time. Additionally, rigorously track engagement — from conversions to unsubscribes — to ensure that your efforts are not driving customers away.

Trend #13 – React To The Impact Of Proactive Communication

CCW Tips: Proactively alerting customers to a service issue may reduce inbound inquiries about what is happening, but it could also increase inbound complaints about the issue at hand. Offering a new mobile app or self-service option may simplify some service issues, but it could create new questions and issues about the functionality of the platform. The point, here, is to remember that every action has a reaction. The best brands do not simply introduce technology or increase their proactive communication; they consider what these initiatives will mean for overall workflow.

Trend #14 – Meaningfully Onboard Your Customers

CCW Tips: In today’s hypercompetitive, speed-driven digital world, the human connection is not guaranteed. Brands have to be deliberate about building real relationships with their customers, and the onboarding phase is one of the best opportunities. Whether through human-written or AI-generated notes, brands can personally thank new customers for their business, set the stage for a valuable relationship, and even promote upgrade/upsell opportunities.

Trend #15 – Harness The Power Of A Customer Data Platform

CCW Tips: The aforementioned steps related to personalization, proactive messaging, and customer onboarding hinge on knowing exactly who your customers are and how they behave throughout the journey. Given that a non-trivial percentage of companies do not even have access to basic profile details about their customers, this intelligence cannot be taken for granted. It is achievable, however, by harnessing the power of a CDP. Beyond managing and democratizing vital intelligence, such platforms also assist with data governance and security.

Trend #16 – Evaluate Journeys, Not Interactions

CCW Tips: We all love to talk about valuing “journeys” over “one-off interactions,” but we do not necessarily measure our experiences that way. Moving forward, it is essential to start doing so. The reality is that heated calls are more a product of previous steps in the journey — a frustrating chatbot, a long wait time — than they are an incompetent agent. By chronicling exactly what the customer experienced en route to the current touch point, the brand can better understand the root cause of their attitude and behavior.

Trend #17 – Reshift The Cost vs. Value Balance

CCW Tips: After years of fighting for the “profit center” label, many contact centers have regressed into cost-cutting mode. Nearly 60% of customers, in fact, say it is harder than ever to get make-goods or refunds. This suggests that many contact centers no longer see the experience as an investment. The best brands will break from this pessimistic mindset, embracing the chance to building lucrative relationships through the CX — even if it means spending a bit more on a customer right now. They also understand the big picture of contact center costs — giving a refund may technically cost money, but so too does dealing with a customer who keeps coming back and demanding a better resolution. By just giving the customer what they want up front (as long as it is within reason), the brand may actually save money en route to building a happier, more supportive, more valuable long-term advocate.

Trend #18 – Digitally Transform For The Right Reason

CCW Tips: Our research confirms that most brands believe customers should be able to handle the same issues in digital channels that they do over the phone. Though this should be an admirable mindset, there is always a risk that it spurs an emphasis on call deflection and phone elimination. We let customers support all issues in chat, some brands may argue, so why should we waste money on a phone call? This attitude, unfortunately, is the antithesis of customer centricity. Customer-centric brands elevate channels to ensure customers can solve problems anywhere they want, but they do not force customers to use channels that only make sense for the business.

Trend #19 – Educate Customers Through Transparency

CCW Tips: Ignoring customer preference is unacceptable. Recognizing that customers may have the wrong preferences, on the other hand, is very acceptable. Brands will know whether a given issue is best-suited for a chatbot, an agent-led digital channel, or a traditional phone call. By transparently educating customers on this knowledge (such as by advising them on the best available channel for a given issue, or providing a transparent look at wait times for all channel options), brands can productively “right channel” customers. Customers will begin to develop the right habits, yet never feel as if they are being forced or deflected into undesirable channels by a cost-cutting brand.

Trend #20 – Make Human Centricity The #1 Priority

CCW Tips: Human employees won’t be involved in every customer interaction or contact center task, but humanity must be at the center of every decision. Self-service tools should be intuitive, low-effort, and supportive of natural language. Customer journeys should be seamless and relevant, demonstrating a recognition not only of customers’ identities but their intentions, unique expectations, and personal preferences and limitations. Agent tools should show respect for the employee’s time, while agent training should be tailored to unique strengths and needs rather than broad knowledge dumps. New channel and technology investments should enhance the user experience rather than simply chase a trend.