In a recent article by Forrester about Artificial Intelligence's (AI) impact on the customer experience, experts are predicting that 2020 is the year organizations closely examine their contact centers and invest in next-generation technology.

Here are a few of the predictions from Forrester:

• "Improvements in AI will cause contact centers to rethink their outsourcing strategy. As automation handles the easy tasks, agents are left to tackle customers’ complex and emotionally wrought questions. This leaves little room for missteps due to cultural dissimilarities. Brands will start to more closely examine contact center locations closer to home, hoping to find agents who really can hit the right empathetic notes.

• Brands will spend $8 billion more on customer service agents in 2020 than the prior year. This will be a consequence of the heightened demand for highly skilled agents (read: higher salaries), as well as employee experience improvements that are necessary to stimulate and retain agents.

• Although gallons of (digital) ink have been spilled predicting the death of the contact center agent job, automation’s earliest impact will come in other parts of the customer service organization. So although the agent role won’t disappear anytime soon, other jobs will start to change in the next 12 months."

Based on our customer engagement, we understand how digital transformation dramatically impacts organizations within the Unified Communications and Contact Center space. In almost all scenarios, in any organization, there is a return on investment (ROI) for cloud based UCaaS and CCaaS.

After stacking up the costs of hardware, maintenance, phone lines, wasted agent time, multiple disparate software platforms, labor costs, slow implementation costs, etc., organizations are quickly migrating to cloud based software which requires little time spent on the operational maintenance of the system.

Phone systems, which have always been considered operational technology, are now being viewed as progressive and imperative to customer satisfaction.  Stereotypical call centers are quickly becoming a place of focus and turning into customer centric contact centers as organizations live and die on reviews; many which are driven by a customer's phone or internet experience

If you haven’t recently evaluated where cloud based systems can impact your organization, now is the time. Whether you are a 10 person organization or 10,000, the impact these technologies can have on your operations is undeniable.

In short, we agree with Forrester that AI and cloud based UCaaS/CCaaS systems are going to be a huge trend moving into 2020 and we can’t wait to see where it goes from here!

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