The call center market continues to experience tremendous growth and innovation, spurred by artificial intelligence (AI) and other new and emerging technologies. Ultimately, offshore call or contact centers will perform better, pay more, and produce happier callers. Here are three trends that will transform the future of contact centers.
Huge Growth for Offshore Call Center Agents
The number of offshore agents will likely mushroom in the next five years. In fact, the global call and contact center outsourcing market was pegged at nearly $93 billion in 2023, a figure that’s expected to increase through 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 9.1%. That’s big.
Such growth will help to narrow some of the performance gap between offshore agents and those located onshore. It’s a problem, with one trade group index showing that while customer satisfaction rates for onshore centers are 82%, those of their offshore centers are around 62%.
That gap is largely due to communication issues that often arise when an agent is speaking to a caller in their second, third, or even fourth language. People commonly have difficulty understanding representatives whose accents are unfamiliar to them. This can result in frustration and cause callers to distrust the agents, doubt their intelligence and competence, and to treat them rudely. In turn, this can lead to agent burnout.
And it’s where AI can help.
Accent softening, which is what we offer, removes accent bias from the equation. Our increasingly popular AI linguistic filter clarifies agents’ voices in real time. That means that as someone speaks, they’ll sound more like what the listener expects or is used to. At length, this technology is going to help significantly with intelligibility and trust.
Other coming trends include grammar AI, an AI-powered tool that corrects grammatical errors, facilitates language translation, and improves sentence structures. Translation apps are also making a difference, as they can translate speech from one language to another. These technologies will make it easier to communicate globally with call centers.
Higher Interaction Complexity
It is true that, when it comes to solving complex problems and thinking through unusual customer issues, humans top AI. Humans are also good at building relationships and trust. But in coming years, increases in calls handled by AI will present opportunities for centers to improve agents’ skills to equip them to better handle complex calls.
In other words, while human agents will have fewer interactions, additional training will provide the skills necessary for them to handle tough situations more skillfully. This will improve the overall customer experience as well as centers’ key performance indicators (KPIs).
Wider Pay Distribution
It bears emphasizing that, in the next few years, AI is going to transform the call center space. In fact, it’s difficult to even imagine how different call centers and contact centers will be in the coming years.
The call center industry is swiftly growing and on the cusp of an upending transformation brought on by artificial intelligence. With Tomato.ai’s accent softening filter leading the way, offshore as well as onshore call centers will ultimately perform better and improve the customer experience.
Want to get the rest of the recommendations? Go deeper with actionable steps when you read our whitepaper: How AI will shape the future of contact centers over the next five years.