Artificial Intelligence Driving CCaaS Boom in Europe

The contact center industry worldwide changed rapidly the past few years because of evolving enterprise requirements and buying behaviors due to the pandemic. Simultaneously, the growth of remote and hybrid work created new challenges for ongoing, positive engagement with contact centers, which make a difference in the ability to deliver high-quality customer outcomes.

What differentiated enterprises across the pond in Europe is that they used new features included in many CCaaS offerings, often powered by AI and machine learning such as chatbots and other persona-based technologies for automated issue resolution. Because of that, the 2022 ISG Provider Lens Contact Center as a Service – CX report for Europe and the U.K. revealed that the European market for cloud contact centers is booming due those benefits of CCaaS offerings.

With CCaaS offerings in Europe being powered by AI, vendors will continue to invest AI-driven solutions. Why? AI and chatbots provide automated issue resolution and redefined query resolution, where AI plays a larger role in determining the need for human intervention and handling skill-based routing based on customer needs.

AI used for automated issue resolution results in happier customers. This leads into the next trend that influenced the contact center space in Europe. Most know that customer satisfaction is a key differentiator and key business performance metric. Ensuring customer interactions are addressed quickly is often considered a business-critical aspect that is discussed and reviewed by the C-suite.

“Continuous improvements in AI are giving enterprises more confidence in what it can do,” said Wayne Butterfield, partner, ISG Automation. “More contact centers are using AI to ingest huge amounts of data to augment human capabilities and hand off queries to the best agent when needed.”

Another factor influencing the contact center space in Europe is the continuous rise of social media. Social media is a way to reach out to the masses quickly, whether they are potentially new customers or existing customers. With social media, enterprises reach out to providers for ways to moderate content, manage their communities and provide 24/7 interaction with customers.

To achieve the high level of customer service, though, enterprises rely on their employees and agents. However, maintaining ongoing engagement levels is a concern for enterprises, according to the report.

Agent experience is an important focus area for providers, and most invest in expanding their product capabilities to include extensive workforce management capabilities, such as speech analytics, supervision features, real-time coaching functionality and gamification. These capabilities enable businesses to virtually maintain engagement levels with their employees.

It is important for enterprises to continue to invest in new technologies and services to keep their agents engaged and keep their customers satisfied. At the same time, it is important for cloud contact center companies to continue to innovate and invest in improving the features and functionalities of their products to accommodate the changing enterprise requirements.

Edited by Erik Linask