Top 5 Predictions for Customer Interaction Analytics in 2022
We can’t believe that another year has passed and we’re again writing our predictions of the year to come, but yes, it’s time to again gaze into the Liquid Voice crystal ball and try and predict what 2022 will bring to the world of interaction recording and analytics.
We‘ve seen a lot of change in 2021, largely as a result of the pandemic. On a human level, we’ve experienced a settling in of what looks to be permanent behavioural shifts such as hybrid working, and an increased reliance of customers on digital channels, and at a business level, we’ve witnessed significant advances in technologies and an acceleration of cloud adoption.
It is always worth taking a step back, observing recent changes, and recognising what’s on the horizon that’s likely to influence contact centres and their customers in the year to come, so we thought we would share our top five predictions for 2022.
1. Customer Experience Will Become Even More Critical
Both customers and regulators are driving us to a point where product and price are coming second place to customer experience. Tempting offers to win customers from the competition are less effective and definitely short-lived, as customer experience is becoming the main factor for reputation and customer retention.
To deliver a differentiated customer experience organisations need to better understand their customers, their preferences and how those preferences are being catered for. For many organisations, it is a case that they know lots about how the customer transacts with them, but very little about any other interactions. We predict that organisations will invest heavily in technologies that enable a better understanding of the customer and turn data into tangible insights. In order to drive the CX agenda, businesses need to capture the end-to-end customer journey and have the analytical capabilities to truly measure and understand the customer experience in both qualitative and quantitative terms.
2. Interaction Analytics Will Be Real-Time
Traditionally analytics have been applied to things that have already happened: quality management of captured calls, compliance reviews of completed transactions or analysis of historic data, for example. There’s value in this of course, but imagine just how valuable these metrics could be if they could be measured and acted upon in real time.
With real-time analytics, agents can be reminded to make a missed compliance statement before the transaction is complete, can get live support to rescue a call if struggling with customer interaction, or can be provided with new scripts as trends appear in live calls..
The great news is, the technology already exists to do this and it’s commercially viable. We see rapid growth in 2022 in the adoption of real-time speech analytics, providing significant aid to agents in delivering the best possible experience to customers, and we expect the ROI of such technology to be proven rapidly.
3. More Channels, More Systems, More Clouds, More Reach
A trend we have seen this year is an increasing number of contact centres moving to cloud-based solutions whether that be telephony, chat or email management. This continues to change the world of interaction recording, moving it off-premises, while expanding the number of platforms where interactions have to be captured.
With a focus on capturing the end-to-end customer journey, we are seeing more organisations wanting to capture interactions over their Unified Comms platform as well as their main Contact Centre. As customers move across departments, it’s important that the quality of their experience is maintained outside of the contact centre.
We expect 2022 to see the final throes of silo’d solutions as even the most reticent organisations adopt a holistic approach to interaction capture and recording. Solutions that can seamlessly integrate with any platform, ingest recordings and provide a single pane of glass to customer interactions.
4. The Legacy Data Challenge
For a number of years now, the legacy data challenge has been brewing. As organisations have moved from one platform to another, they drag behind them a plethora of legacy platforms that they have to maintain in order to retain recordings. Now, as we see more and more businesses adopt Digital Transformation programmes that shift applications and data to the cloud, we are seeing growing concerns about how to handle these legacy recordings in a way that is both compliant and extracts business value from them.
The need to be compliant, reduce costs and reduce carbon footprint are all factors that will be built in 2022 to drive organisations to address the legacy data challenge. To take the step to consolidate recordings into a single repository, to clean toxic data, redact and secure sensitive data and remove the need to maintain these legacy platforms moving forward.
5. It’s All About The Customer Experience Hub
All of the predictions above we see as contributing to our final prediction. This is a subtle but important one, the term interaction recording will disappear, and the focus will be on creating a customer experience hub.
With today’s cloud-based platforms, whether voice or chat, the capture of interaction is now a standard part of the solution: you no longer need a standalone recording solution. What you do need though, is a way of taking these recordings from source, enriching them with contextual information and key data tags, and consolidating them in a single repository to create a single view of the customer journey. This is the customer experience hub.
We hope you find our predictions interesting and If any of the points raised in this blog resonate with you, we would be more than happy to discuss them in more detail. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us on +44 (0) 113 200 2020 or email us at sales@liquidvoice.com.
