A contact center with the right tools can help you meet and exceed customer expectations with every interaction. An effective contact center solution makes it easy for customers to connect with your business to get support on their preferred communication channels while empowering agents with an intuitive user experience infused with intelligence.
Combining these elements creates a balanced contact center experience that increases agent productivity and efficiency, boosts personalization, and adapts to changing needs. As AI technology advances and evolves at warp speed, staying on top of call center trends is important to set yourself apart from the competition.
Check out these updated call center statistics to keep the pulse of the industry.
Contact Center Insights At a Glance
Here’s a TL;DR roundup of the most important call center insights for 2024.
- 53% of businesses say they handle most support interactions through email, 48% say voice, 38% say live chat, and 38% say text messaging. (Nextiva)
- Interactions via social media channels make up 25% of support requests. (Nextiva)
- 59% of Millennials and 57% of Gen Z consumers are trending toward support via social media. (McKinsey)
- Generative AI continues to trend, with 70% of customer experience leaders planning to integrate the technology in the next two years. (Zendesk)
- By 2025, it’s estimated that AI will drive 95% of customer interactions. (AI Business)
Customers Expectations Grow Higher
It’s no secret that delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX) means consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Here are a few call center stats to help you understand evolving customer expectations and how the best contact center software can help.
- The average customer satisfaction index (ACSI) score for businesses in the U.S. is 77.8. (American Customer Satisfaction Index)
- 65% of customers say they expect instant responses when they contact a brand. (Salesforce).
- 70% of customers expect anyone they interact with to have full context of the conversation. (Zendesk)
- Customers are 73% more likely to switch to a competitor after multiple negative experiences. (Zendesk)
- 76% of customers say they get frustrated when they don’t receive personalized support. (McKinsey).
Evolving Contact Center Technologies
Contact center technology constantly evolves, impacting how businesses deliver customer support. Staying up to speed with the right tools for your call center software can help you stay ahead of the curve and set you apart from the competition.
- 71% of businesses use digital channels for first contact and phone for escalations or complex issues. (Zendesk)
- Generative AI is expected to influence 42% of voice-based interactions in the next two years. (Zendesk)
- One study found that AI chatbots are 20% more effective at answering customer queries successfully than rule-based chatbots. (McKinsey)
- Social listening tools are on the rise, with 25% of CX leaders saying their support teams use contact center software with reputation monitoring tools to handle customer interactions on online review sites. (Nextiva)
- Generative AI is predicted to be embedded in 80% of conversational AI offerings, a 20% increase from 2023. (Gartner)
According to Ken McMahon, Chief Customer Officer at Nextiva, businesses need to adapt to the changing customer service landscape and adopt AI technologies.
“In contact center voice channels, organizations are behind if they are still using hardware telephony infrastructure.” He adds, “Businesses need to rapidly adapt their contact center as a service (CCaaS), or they will cease being relevant in the customer experience.”
Self-Service Tools Ramp Up Efficiency
Convenient support starts with self-service options and an optimized knowledge base. Self-service resources benefit everyone: the customer doesn’t have to deal with long wait times to get support resulting in deflected tickets and more manageable agent workloads.
These AI-powered contact center knowledge base statistics and self-service trends provide valuable insight into scaling your call center operations and boosting customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
- 61% of customers say they would rather use self-service for simple issues. (Salesforce)
- 74% of customers say they will use self-service again after experiencing an easy transition to a live customer service agent. (Gartner)
- If they can’t use self-service to resolve an issue, 38% of Gen Z and Millennial customers say they are likely to give up on a customer service issue. (Gartner)
- Self-service content reduces the amount of phone traffic for common issues. (Zendesk)
- 88% of multi-channel customer journeys start in self-service, making creating seamless transitions between those channels important. (Gartner)
Edwin Margulies, Chief Evangelist at Nextiva, says, “A contact center equipped with an AI knowledge base helps provide self-service resources that deflect tickets efficiently. Add automation tools that handle mundane tasks, it saves agents time and lets them focus on tasks that require a human touch, which helps with customer relations and retention.”
Budgets Scale To Achieve Growth
Investing in the contact center with the right tools that fit your business needs can help you deliver customer support at scale while reducing operational costs. That’s contact center management — and it’s all about finding the right balance. These contact center operations statistics might help you understand the numbers behind the budget.
- 73% of contact center leaders plan to increase their budgets over the next year. (Nextiva)
- 55% of contact centers increased their software budget in 2024, with 18% of respondents reporting a 21-40% increase. (CX Today)
- The average contact center cost-per-call ranges between $2.70 and $5.60. (F. Curtis Barry & Company)
- 41% of CX leaders plan to increase their budgets for phone support in 2024. (Zendesk)
Workforces Grow To Meet Demand
Increasing your workforce to meet demand doesn’t simply mean adding headcount. With the right contact center software, you can use AI and automation to streamline workflows and optimize customer support with the same reliable team you already have. Here are a few contact center workforce statistics that may be surprising.
- 69% of respondents expect to hire more contact center employees over the next year. (Nextiva)
- 24% of respondents have a 100% virtual/remote contact center staff. (Nextiva)
- Less than 10% of contact center operators have no remote call center employees. (Nextiva)
Contact center software with AI-powered workforce management (WFM) and workforce optimization (WFO) tools allows businesses to forecast and staff each shift accurately and improve agent performance on every call. These tools include high-speed speech analytics, transcription, and classification technologies that reduce the need for supervisors to manually sift through voice recordings to do quality monitoring and agent assessment.
According to Margulies, “With automated compliance scorecards and phrase searches, supervisors can easily pinpoint a breakdown in compliance and offer valuable coaching. It is simply innovative to provide a real-time safety net for customers by monitoring their sentiment, task progress, and behavior with the proper tooling.”
Hyper-Personalization Is Standard
Customers want fast, convenient omnichannel support as well as personalized service. Personalized interactions can be the key to increasing customer retention and building customer loyalty.
- 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions. (McKinsey)
- Systems that provide support teams with easier access to customer data allow them to provide more personalized interactions, say 62% of CX agents. (Zendesk)
- AI-driven personalization will impact e-commerce businesses and their customers the most, according to 72% of retailers. (eMarketer)
- 18% of customer care leaders plan to invest in generative AI for customer experience hyper-personalization. (McKinsey)
Margulies says that contact centers with AI-powered agent-assist technology help call center agents personalize the customer experience. “Today, we can transcribe speech in real-time and feed the text into an AI-powered knowledge base, helping the agent provide personalized suggestions more easily.”
What’s Next? 3 Future Predictions
You don’t need a crystal ball to see the contact center experience of the future. We’ve analyzed the trends and done the contact center research for you so you can get a jump start on enhancing your customer experience in your contact center.
#1: The phone will be around for a long, long time
Although communication channels continue to evolve, phone support is still the go-to channel across all generations. According to McKinsey, baby boomers make up the highest percentage of customers who prefer contacting support by phone at 94%, while Gen Z is the lowest (yet still high) at 71%.
McKinsey also found that more than half of CX leaders expect a 20% increase in call volume over the next two years. With the advances in AI, Zendesk predicts that voice may be moving toward an advanced role used to handle complex and escalated issues rather than the first point of contact. Either way, phone support isn’t going anywhere.
#2: Chatbots are here to stay with lots to say
Chatbots are improving, using machine learning, natural language processing, and conversational AI to deliver more human-like support. Nextiva found that contact center agents can save up to 50% of the time per interaction with our AI chatbots and voice software featured in our contact center solution.
Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) can help across channels like voice, chat, and text, providing self-service options or seamless handoffs to live agents when a human touch is needed. Plus, providing intelligent, automated support helps keep staffing under control, reducing operational costs.
#3: Even more contact center employees will work from home
The demand for flexible, virtual call centers continues to grow as call center employees remain in remote environments. In fact, Nextiva found that nearly 25% of businesses surveyed have a 100% remote workforce in their call center. Nextiva sets up in minutes and allows you to manage all agents in one place, both in-house and remote.
Future-Proof Your Contact Center
When customer expectations are at an all-time high, don’t take chances with disparate customer service tools. Nextiva provides an AI-based call center solution that helps businesses of all sizes deliver fast, personalized support. Empower your agents with a modern platform trusted by over 100,000 businesses and the #1 ranked call center infrastructure software on G2 in 2024.
Related: Contact Center Industry: Hype vs. Reality (and What’s Next)
| Contact Center Study Methodology Nextiva conducted a survey to gather benchmark call center metrics and KPIs and learn more about contact center statistics, trends, and predictions from 168 business leaders in the customer experience industry. |
