Resolve 2022: What’s Next For Contact Center Automation?

By Harry Chang
November 9, 2022

The future of contact centers is constantly changing and impossible to predict. But at Replicant’s Resolve 2022 conference, the future got a bit clearer as CX leaders from a range of industries confirmed the challenges we’ve heard about time and time again.

Contact centers have been experiencing tremendous pressure following the pandemic and the Great Resignation. According to the 2022 Benchmark Report, the past two years have led 54% of leaders to cite high and increasing costs as an immediate challenge. Another 49% said hiring enough agents is an immediate challenge. And almost all, 91%, report that automation is a critical or important priority in the next year.

Replicant’s product team took some time at Resolve 2022 to dive deeper into what the future of Contact Center Automation looks like and how it will continue to be a leading solution for complex CX challenges.

Greater collaboration between humans and machines

Contact Center Automation is already shaping a hybrid environment to meet the needs of a changing workforce. Replicant is automating millions of common, repetitive requests, allowing agents to be more available for more high value calls. The future will see agents and automation work even better together to divide and conquer as automation adds more use cases that enable machines to fully resolve even more call drivers. CX leaders will see more savings and efficiency gains as machines take on more requests and give back more time to agents.

Seamless experiences across languages and channels

Quality voice conversations are a hallmark of Contact Center Automation. 87% of contact center leaders indicate that the voice channel has the highest perceived value of automation compared to any other channel they use. But in the future, the value of automation will gain greater consistency across channels with a single engine that powers even better conversations wherever customers choose to interact with a brand. A core conversation engine at the core of omnichannel automation means no more coordinating with multiple vendors and easier tweaks on a per-channel basis.

More control for contact centers

Automation doesn’t stop at implementation. In fact, Contact Center Automation is at its best when machines are continuously learning about customers and how to meet their needs. The future of automation will give managers even more visibility into the whole customer journey, in one place, without having to manually dig through data. And with A/B testing and script building, they’ll have even greater capabilities to test new flows and react quickly when new opportunities to improve CSAT arise.

Component-driven design built for speed

With Replicant, deploying Contact Center Automation has never been easier: deployments can take just weeks compared to the months to years-long process of building your own solution. In the future, speed-to-value will only increase as more features and configurations become reusable – from business logic to integrations to Natural Language Understanding (NLU). This will give a distinct advantage to leaders who begin automating earlier, as they’ll be able to quickly scale to new flows and cost-cutting opportunities.

Reliability in overflow events

While contact centers will always wrestle with unpredictability, they can rest assured knowing that automation is there to relieve agents during unforeseen spikes in demand. Automation can take 100% of requests across channels, scale infinitely, or be used for after hours or overflow support. And with new languages constantly being added and improved, automation will be a boon for an even greater pool of customers.

For contact center leaders at Resolve 2022, it was clear that no feature adds as much value as dependability, and automation will ensure that innovative brands aren’t beholden to agent availability and customer demand in order to provide great service.