The COVID-19 pandemic threw down the gauntlet for customer contact leaders, urging them to modernize their operations and increase agility. It was a reminder that the customer experience of yesterday is already obsolete - and sure to become even less relevant amid future change.

Granted, it also introduced companies to initiatives that can positively impact customer contact, including work-from-home, business continuity planning, automation, and digital engagement.

The key will be transforming these initiatives from “crisis response” contingencies into permanent fixtures. How will we approach remote work once a return to the office becomes permissible? How will we approach digital channels once interaction volume subsides (yet standards for engagement quality rise)?

CCW Digital’s Market Study on Modernizing Service Experiences with AI & Digital answers these questions - and many more.

With the customer experience landscape becoming more competitive, we must transition from discussing the hype to demanding results. As brands are doubling down on omnichannel chatbot investments and customers are asking for chatbot engagement, why are businesses not seeing an ROI? And why are customers lacking trust in a medium that they’re asking for?

This special report on omnichannel chatbots has the answers. It details your new blueprint for implementing, measuring and optimizing chatbots.

Topics include:

• The most common mistakes in chatbot engagement
• Exclusive insights from a Customer Experience WSJ and NYT bestselling author, Lyft social media lead, CCW analysts’ and Salesforce research
• 5 solutions and strategies to implement more intelligent chatbot technologies
• Emerging digital transformation trends in the CX realm
  

An overwhelmingly low percentage of employees, specifically contact center agents, report feeling “highly engaged” at work, having quantifiable and costly results. The industry rate of engagement in the contact center has stagnated, and disaffected employees have a disproportionately negative effect.

Through CCW research and case study driven examples displayed throughout this report, you’ll discover:

• 5 New strategies and techniques on how to engage agents
• The right competitive tools and practices to help them produce more
• A new approach to increase office culture and synergy
• How to decrease costly turnover rates and help your company achieve greater financial returns on your employees.
  

Companies subject customers to ineffective digital channels, long wait times, and impersonal conversations not because they do not care about improving but because their contact center operations and technologies do not allow it. This Emerging Technology Review highlights the key strategic shifts you should make, as well as technology that will turn customer centricity into a reality.

Topics include:

• 5 reasons contact centers are failing customers and agents
• How recent events are exacerbating the biggest contact center challenges
• What it really takes to create an "omnichannel" experience
• Which customer (and business) insights are critical to success

This report is your guide to navigate this difficult climate by successfully engaging customers, delivering customer experience, and continuing to engage them in the future whether in economic turmoil or not. Topics in this report includes:

• 5 crucial focus points to invest in to become a customer centric organization during a crisis
• Why organizations need to establish agility as a fundamental quality
• The importance of empathy to drive a more mature workforce now and for the future What is a super channel and is it better than omnichannel?
• Insight into peak operational readiness and business continuity planning
• How to maintain engagement and nurture culture when agents go remote
  

For most organizations, especially during times of pandemonium and economic misfortune, efficiently managing a team of front-line employees (or field force), is one of the most operationally complex tasks. Featuring executive interviews with insights and analysis from industry leaders, in this report you’ll learn:

• A 3-step-approach to increasing productivity through Field Service Management
• How to manage your front-line employees to increase productivity and revenue
• Real-time scheduling and operational efficiency
• How to deliver a managerial metric mentality
  

Contact center leaders are relentlessly debating the future of omnichannel engagement and what it will mean for the contact center. In this report you’ll learn to hire the right people, design the right experiences, implement the right technology and set the right metrics, ultimately ensuring you can deliver a great experience no matter where, when or why your customers connect. 

Topics include:

• 5 omnichannel trends that are disrupting the contact center
• New skills  your omnichannel “super agents” will require
• The role chat will play in the future of the contact center
• Tips for measuring performance in digital channels
• Insights into the balance between “call deflection” and customer centricity

Are you focusing on the right metrics and objectives? Are you prioritizing important technology - and ignoring overhyped fads? Are you taking the steps to make customer centricity a reality?

Our Special Report: 2020 Contact Center Predictions will help you answer these questions. Featuring insights from rockstar executives, best-selling authors, innovative technology creators and seasoned analysts, this exclusive guide reveals what to expect -- and what to prioritize -- in the year ahead.

Across our portfolio of events and digital content, CCW spent 2019 providing an ample number of “whys.” We chronicled the most pressing trends, the most important new objectives and explored the most crippling challenges. With the goal of helping you calibrate your strategy for 2020 and beyond, we’ve recapped some of our top findings below.

We were already adapting to a new normal - one in which digital engagement, automation, cloud technology and new expectations changed the way we thought about customer contact. Then came COVID-19, which added immense urgency to these initiatives. Robust work-from-home and AI strategies became essential rather than admirable. CX objectives also changed, with companies, agents and customers reconsidering what they wanted to get out of interactions.

Is your contact center technology helping or hurting in your quest?

Contact center technology is not delivering on its promise and may in fact be creating additional effort and frustration for agents and customers. Our new Market Study uncovers this research. More importantly, it reveals how to rethink the technology landscape to achieve unprecedented customer contact value.

Topics include:

• What are the biggest contact center objectives, and what role is technology playing?
• What are the biggest mistakes when it comes to contact center technology?
• Are internal power struggles hurting contact center technology?
• Is automation living up to the hype?
• Is journey mapping transforming CX?
• What are the most important factors when investing in new tools?
  

We in the customer contact space know this lesson better than anyone. The majority of us play catch-up when it comes to adding contact channels, gathering customer insights, implementing new technology and empowering agents, leaving a select few to reap the rewards of customer centricity.

Let this Market Study on the Contact Center of 2025 be your instrument for the future. Yes, it explores the lingering challenges and stereotypes we need to urgently address. It does not, however, dwell exclusively on the past. It also looks ahead, considering how automation, omnichannel engagement, customer data, emerging technology and cross-industry benchmarking will forever change the contact center landscape.

Though unwise, it was very easy to ignore calls to develop a business continuity plan during periods of fortune. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are seeing the consequences of their inactivity. They are unprepared for the changing realities of the workplace, and unable to swiftly satisfy their customers. It is time to rethink the approach, not only to support work-from-home in the near-term but to ensure your CX remains strong in the face of future risk.

Technology should be easy. That premise holds true when we look at smartphone applications and all they’re capable of doing: photo editing, banking, stock transactions, weather forecasts in 30-minute increments, plus browsing and purchasing anything from anywhere across the globe. Often, however, “easy” is not the way we would describe the systems and applications we depend on for work -- especially in a call center.

As they adjust to unfortunate economic circumstances, remote work, and digital transformation, brands are scrambling to keep their customer experience intact. For many, this has been a significant challenge. The Q1 climate took a toll on many businesses, demonstrated by market fluctuation and economic circumstances customer experience and financial analysts haven’t seen since the crisis of 07-08. To mitigate these challenging economic times and achieve some semblance of business continuity, contact center solutions have never been more important.

Three months ago it was very easy to ignore a business continuity plan (BCP), since many of us took for granted our business’ profitability, steady markets, engaging office cultures, and to put it bluntly, success. Thanks to that complacency, many are quickly forgetting what success tastes like.