End User Priorities for Customer Engagement in Europe, 2018

Navigating Digital Transformation in Contact Centers

The overall research objective is to measure the current use and future decision making behavior toward contact center solutions in the following industries: Education, IT/Communications, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Outsourcing, Retail & Consumer, and Travel & Hospitality.

Technologies covered:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Natural Language Speech Recognition
• Chat, Chat Bot (Interactive Text Response), Messaging Bot (Facebook, WeChat, etc.)
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Live Agent Voice
• Mobile Customer Care
• Proactive Outbound
• Social Media
• Video, Video Kiosks
• Virtual Assistant Text Chat, Virtual Assistant Voice
• Web
• Cloud/Hosted Contact Center Trends

This research aims to:

• Understand the IT-related challenges organizations face today
• Monitor the status of digital transformation including newer solutions such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and XaaS
• Assess the current and future use of contact center technologies
• Evaluate factors that drive investments in contact center technologies
• Gauge IT and communications trends
• Provide KPI data

Research Highlights

• The most used interaction channels in organizations today are email (87% of respondents), web (86%), and chat (80%). The largest investments over the next two years will be video kiosks (59%) and virtual assistant voice (51%).
• There is a strong movement towards full integration, where contact centers will be able to deliver seamless omnichannel experiences to customers. Silos within organizations pose the main challenge to organizations unable to provide an omnichannel experience.
• The primary goal of using social media is to provide customer service through sites like Facebook and Twitter.
• The ability to access websites from mobile devices are a top priority for businesses.
• The prevalent obstacle to meeting goals within contact centers is the difficulty of training agents on new processes, tasks, and skills.