In a customer survey of 1,210 IT and telecom decision-makers around the world and across verticals (with 58% of respondents in a senior management position), improving customer experience is ranked as the top business objective in 2022, followed closely by improving brand equity. Companies recognize that maintaining brand loyalty becomes increasingly difficult as the world accelerates towards digital channels.
     
For the first time in over ten years of running this survey, improving employee engagement moved from the bottom of top company objectives to number 4. It took a pandemic for companies to understand the value of employee satisfaction and retention. Unclear roles, substantial absences that created more tasks for employees who came into work, and uncertainty about job security created significant barriers to achieving corporate goals. Companies are now rethinking their corporate culture and technology investment strategies.
     
Social and self-service are fast-growing channels. The pandemic forced non-digitally native people to move towards these methods of communicating with companies when they could not reach agents for hours or get quick email responses. Companies are highly satisfied with the self-service channel.
     
The top concern for IT is dealing with security concerns. The rise in remote employees exacerbated this issue. With everyone working or learning from home, IT departments struggled to ensure sufficient bandwidth, provide access to data and applications, enable privacy, onboard and train employees, and handle problem tickets.
     
Analytics and CX are the top solutions in place today. With the enormous amount of data available today from many sources, it must be mined, organized, pertinent, and customized to provide customers with positive experiences.
     
The primary goals of this research are to:

•     Understand the impact of COVID-19 on contact centers
•     Understand challenges organizations face today
•     Monitor the status of digital transformation
•     Assess the current and future use of contact center solutions
•     Evaluate factors that drive investments in contact center solutions
•     Gauge market and technology trends
•     Appraise available IT budgets
•     Measure perceptions by vertical industry
•     Discover opportunities in different regions

Vertical industries covered:
•     Agriculture / Food & Beverages
•     Banking/Finance/Insurance
•     Construction
•     Education
•     Energy & Utilities
•     Government
•     Healthcare
•     High Tech
•     Manufacturing
•     Retail & Wholesale
•     Transportation & Storage
•     Travel & Hospitality
•     Professional Services

Investments predicted for the following channels:
•     Voice
•     Chat with live agent
•     Video chat, video teller/kiosk
•     Self-service (ex., conversational AI, chat bots, IVR)
•     Social media (ex., Twitter, Facebook)
•     Social media messaging apps (ex., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat)
•     SMS
•     Mobile app
•     Email/web form

Investments measured for the following technologies:
•     Virtual agents
•     Natural language processing
•     Speech recognition
•     Computer vision, Image recognition
•     Face recognition
•     Emotion recognition
•     Sentiment analytics
•     Robotic process automation

Investments predicted for the following applications:
•     Conversational AI and self-service to offload and support agents Proactive customer care
•     eLearning for agents
•     Unified communications
•     Performance management
•     Quality management
•     Gamification
•     Flexible APIs/CPaaS to integrate third-party capabilities into the customer experience
•     Videoconferencing
•     Voice of customer
•     Voice of employee
•     Customer journey analytics
•     Marketing analytics
•     Sales analytics
•     Social media analytics

Author: Alpa Shah