Future Channels of Customer Centricity: 2025

Just about every company in every industry trumpets the importance of the customer experience, but it’s the same handful of companies — Zappos, Apple, Amazon, Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom, etc. — that maintain icon status.  While these companies have undoubtedly dominated the game of personalized customer experience in their given industries, they maintain their reputations for customer service because they are the market leaders when it comes to trendsetting. They’re the cool kids on the block that know what trends are “in” before anyone else. And you can too. 

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Solving a consumer’s pain point will always be the focus of meaningful customer service. However, the question is, where will technology make its biggest impact to help organizations solve these pain points? CCW Digital recently collected data from a series of studies that surveyed contact center, marketing, customer experience, information technology, operations and C-suite professionals in quite possibly our best market study yet. In preparation for our upcoming online event, The Contact Center of 2025, we wanted to share a couple of our findings on one of the market study’s insightful trends on the future of business, channels of the contact center.

Chatbots and IVR

According to the study, 84% of businesses believe chat and messaging bots will become more important in five years. Only 3% believe this form of communication will become less important.  While this is undoubtedly a stat that business leaders need to be aware of, it makes you wonder, what other channels will consumers prefer and businesses use. 

As CCW Digital Principal Analyst, Brian Cantor, described in the study, the phone will not disappear in 2025. Many organizations believe live voice interactions will become even more important. Interest is, however, beginning to skew toward automated voice interactions. Nearly 50% of companies, in fact, say the IVR (interactive voice response) will become more important over the next few years. Only 17% expect its relevance to decline.

Messaging and Social Media

Many contact centers do nonetheless expect the promise of a digital transformation to come to fruition. Agent-assisted digital interactions are one of those transformations beginning to occur. According to the study, “Nearly 81% expect messaging to become more important (only 4% expect it to become less important), and 76% say the same of live chat (with merely 6% anticipating a dip in relevance).” It’s imperative for businesses to be able to interact with customers on not only the most efficient means of communication from their perspective, but targeting consumers on their preferred means of communication.

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Social media (68% say more important, 5% say less important) and connected devices (60% say more important, 5% say less important) are also on the rise. Depending upon your target market, these percentages may fluctuate in relevancy. For example, Gen Z and Millennials may use social media to handle customer service inquiries and reviews more than Gen X. 

Getting Ahead

While phone is still king in the customer contact realm, digital transformation is inevitable. If you want to stay ahead of the game and differentiate yourself from competitors through the latest business trends in customer experience, marketing, information technology, operations, and the contact center, download our latest market study or register for our upcoming online event on December 3rd and 4th.  Introduce yourself to analysts’ predictions and upcoming cutting-edge technology trends that will grow your business. Everyone knows the right questions to ask in customer centricity, but fewer analysts know the answers than CCW’s world-class experts and contributors.