Driven by the growing need to streamline processes, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs, call centers and contact centers have gone through a significant transformation over the recent years. This is where AI-powered contact center automation solutions came into play.
When implemented right, contact center automation tools and technologies can boost customer satisfaction, help you improve overall operational efficiency by miles, and save costs – which had previously been much more challenging. On top of that, they give your business a competitive edge.
In this blog, we’ll explore what’s going to shape the future of contact center automation and take a closer look at some of the major contact center automation trends that are currently on the rise in the contact center industry and are likely to get bigger in the coming decade.
What is Contact Center Automation, and How is it Helpful?
Contact center automation is basically the implementation and usage of contact center automation technology and tools to simplify and optimize existing processes, operations, and workflows, eliminating or significantly reducing the need for human intervention. These technologies typically involve AI and Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Robotic Process Automation.
Call center automation solutions can make things easier for both customers and agents while also allowing call centers to improve critical metrics and KPIs and reduce support costs. For customers, it means getting their issues resolved faster (or even independently) and receiving a better service experience. For agents, automation means fewer repetitive manual tasks and improved efficiency and productivity.
Top 10 Contact Center Automation Trends That Will Matter Decades Ahead
The implementation of contact center automation tools driven by AI is rapidly increasing, impacting the future of the call center industry. In fact, according to a study by Grand View Research, the global call center AI market size is expected to reach USD 7.08 billion by 2030, expanding at a CAGR of 22.7% from 2022 to 2030. It means that more call centers are going to adopt AI and automation technologies to streamline operations and drive their business growth.
Deloitte’s Global Contact Center Survey also revealed that 79% of contact center leaders plan to invest in greater AI capabilities in the following years. Let’s explore the top call center and contact center automation technologies that are currently used in call centers and contact centers and are going to be adopted at a larger scale in the not-so-distant future.
1. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic process automation (RPA) isn’t a new concept in contact centers. Agents have always struggled with the abundance of repetitive tasks that are absolutely necessary yet seldom require any human intelligence and decision-making.
Robotic process automation enabled call centers to optimize many operational processes and rule-based tasks, like routing calls, identifying customers, entering data and updating information in the CRM, scheduling follow-ups, and many more.
As AI technologies improve and advance, RPA will definitely continue to impact call centers, helping them improve operational efficiency and agent productivity. Research by Kearney actually found that AI and robotic process automation (RPA) solutions have the power to reduce human-agent interaction time by 40% by 2027, freeing agents up to focus on more value-added tasks.
2. Predictive Call Routing
Modern call center solutions employ intelligent call routing systems that are aimed to automate the call routing process and route callers to the most appropriate agents based on their skills (known as skill-based routing) or other predefined routing rules and criteria. The caller is identified through the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, and based on the caller’s selection, the call is connected to the agent who is best equipped to handle their type of inquiry.
With the power of AI, call routing systems have become even more sophisticated, turning into what is now known as predictive routing or predictive behavioral routing. The predictive routing technology evaluates a customer’s past behavior, preferences, persona type, agent score, and other parameters to match the customer with the best-fitting agent who is most likely to serve the customer in the most optimal way.
Considering that 75% of customers expect companies to use new technologies to create better experiences, according to a Salesforce study – more call centers are likely to adopt predictive behavioral routing in the near future to deliver more personalized service experiences and improve CSAT scores.
3. AI-driven IVR Systems
Even though digital communication channels are on the rise, phone is still one of the most preferred communication channels for today’s consumers across many industries. That’s why IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is definitely here to stay, as it remains critical in the call center’s ability to handle inbound calls effectively. And according to Verified Market Research, the global IVR market size is expected to reach USD 9.26 Billion by 2031 (from USD 5.56 Billion in 2024).
With an IVR system, you can capture each caller’s intent and ensure each caller is instantly routed to the right department or specific agent. That ultimately means fewer call transfers, reduced handle times, improved FCR rates, and increased Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT).
More importantly, IVR systems aren’t just remaining essential for call centers – they are becoming much more advanced and efficient thanks to conversational AI, speech recognition, voice biometrics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and other technologies they blend with. Based on McKinsey, next-gen IVR systems can reduce the number of live-agent calls by over 10%, speed up issue resolution, and deliver a fivefold improvement in CSAT scores.
4. AI-powered Voice Bots
The increased adoption of AI-powered voice bots (also known as AI voice agents or AI virtual agents) is one of the top call center automation trends that is going to be big in the coming years. No wonder that according to the Voicebots Market Report by IndustryARC, the voicebots market size is estimated to reach $98.2 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 18.6% during the forecast period 2022-2027.
AI voice bots use Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Generation (NLG), and other technologies to engage with callers through natural dialogue and provide quick and accurate responses to customer queries. On top of that, AI voice bots use Machine Learning to improve the accuracy and relevance of responses they provide by learning from past interactions and user feedback.
AI voice bots are truly great customer service automation tools as they can handle your inbound calls, answer FAQs, provide the most accurate and relevant information about your products or services, and help your customers resolve basic issues – all without getting your reps involved. AI voice bots can also qualify inbound leads through a series of predefined questions, saving your sales reps a bunch of time and effort.
Recommended reading: Customer Service AI Voice Bots: The Ultimate Guide
5. Conversational AI Chatbots
Conversational AI chatbots are also becoming tremendously popular as more businesses are looking for ways to automate their customer service operations. According to Gartner, by 2027, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for a quarter of organizations. Similarly to AI voice bots, chatbots allow contact centers to offer a more accessible customer service experience with round-the-clock availability while improving customer satisfaction and reducing support costs.
AI chatbots excel in answering simple questions and resolving basic support requests. But they aren’t only used for customer service automation – AI chatbots are also being increasingly adopted by sales teams. Based on the Chatbot Trends Report by Intercom, 41% of all business chatbots are used for sales purposes, while business leaders claim that, on average, chatbots have increased their sales by 67%.
Despite the rapid adoption of AI chatbots and voice bots, they aren’t likely to replace human agents anytime soon as they fall short in resolving complicated issues. Besides, even the most advanced bots lack empathy, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking. According to HubSpot, 62% of consumers would rather talk to a human rep over a bot when they have complex questions or difficult problems.
Recommended reading: Enterprise AI Chatbots: Features, Benefits, and Common Use Cases
6. AI Predictive Auto Dialing
Predictive auto dialers are powerful contact center technology solutions widely used in outbound call centers to automate the process of making outbound calls to large lists of prospects or customers. And the adoption of predictive dialing solutions in outbound call centers is only going to accelerate at a tremendous pace. A report by Grand View Research states that the global predictive dialer software market size is expected to reach USD 12.2 billion by 2028 (compared to USD 1.03 billion in 2020).
Predictive auto dialers place multiple outbound phone calls per agent simultaneously before an agent becomes available. The predictive dialing system uses complex ML algorithms that ‘predict’ agent availability and adjust the dialing pace automatically based on factors like the average call duration, call abandonment rate, the number of available agents at any given time, etc. That helps minimize idle time, enhance agent productivity, and boost the operational efficiency of outbound call centers.
VoiceSpin’s predictive dialer goes even further in automating and optimizing the outbound calling process. The dialer scores leads and agents and automatically matches the leads to the most suitable agents who are most likely to make the sale based on the given scores. It helps improve the efficiency of outbound calling campaigns and increase sales conversions.
7. AI Speech Analytics
As speech analytics continues to evolve, contact centers will increasingly rely on speech analytics solutions to automate and optimize call quality monitoring, improve customer satisfaction through data-driven insights, and reduce call center costs. And the increased adoption of these solutions will also fuel further market growth. Based on Market Research Future, the global speech analytics market is expected to reach a revenue of $9.33 billion by 2030, growing at a 20.38% CAGR throughout the forecast period (2022–2030).
VoiceSpin’s AI speech analytics software is an excellent example of what these tools are capable of. It can monitor all your inbound and outbound calls and evaluate the quality of interactions based on your specific metrics, giving you valuable insights into customer behavior, trends, agent performance, and much more. You can then use these insights to reveal the causes of customer dissatisfaction and identify agent training opportunities. More importantly, it can track specific keywords and help you prevent costly non-compliance issues.
Overall, using speech analytics solutions can drive cost savings of up to 30% and improve customer satisfaction scores by 10%, according to McKinsey.
Recommended reading: Speech Analytics in Call Centers: Unlocking the Potential of Voice Data
8. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is also gaining greater importance in contact centers and call centers. Based on a study by Grand View Research, sentiment analysis is likely to emerge as the fastest-growing technological trend in the call center AI market.
Sentiment analysis tools allow contact centers to assess customer emotions during interactions, both voice and digital. More specifically, sentiment analysis solutions use NLP, machine learning, speech recognition, text analytics, sentiment scoring algorithms, and other technologies to accurately identify emotional cues in text or speech and classify customer sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative.
In practice, it helps agents to better understand the emotional state of customers right during the interactions so they can adjust their responses accordingly. And this ultimately leads to more personalized and empathetic customer experiences, helping you increase customer satisfaction, improve loyalty, and reduce customer churn.
Recommended reading: Call Center Sentiment Analysis and How it Works
9. Predictive Analytics
The demand for predictive analytics will certainly continue to grow in the following years as more contact centers are looking for ways to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, and prevent customer churn. According to Allied Market Research, the global contact center analytics market is projected to reach $8.1 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 20.6% from 2022 to 2031, with an increased demand for predictive analytics being one of the key market growth drivers.
Predictive analytics solutions will help call centers forecast call volumes more accurately so they can better predict staffing needs, optimize agent schedules, and avoid understaffing and overstaffing. In addition, predictive analytics will help contact centers identify potential upsell or cross-sell opportunities and increase sales.
But more importantly, predictive analytics tools will help businesses prevent customer churn by identifying customers at risk of churn based on past interaction patterns. That empowers businesses to implement proactive retention strategies and address issues before they drive customers away.
10. Generative AI Agent Assist
Generative AI agent assist solutions have been rapidly transforming contact centers, helping agents serve customers faster and better by equipping them with the right knowledge at the right time. An NBER study recently found that access to AI assistance can increase the productivity of support agents by 14%, as measured by the number of issues they are able to resolve per hour.
But not only do AI agent assist tools allow agents to resolve customer issues faster, reducing frustrating wait times for customers and increasing customer satisfaction. These solutions actually improve the experiences for your agents too by instantly retrieving data from your internal knowledge sources and offering real-time reply suggestions so your reps don’t have to search for the information they need and craft responses from scratch.
AI agent assist solutions aren’t only helpful in customer service interactions – they can be particularly helpful during sales calls. For example, gen AI agent assist tools can offer next-best-action suggestions, personalized product recommendations based on past purchases, or guidelines on how to best handle objections.
Recommended reading: Generative AI in Contact Center: the Ultimate Guide for 2025
Key Benefits of Using Contact Center Automation Solutions
Let’s now take a closer look at some of the specific benefits of implementing contact center automation solutions:
Reduced human errors
Your contact center agents are human beings. If they are required to perform a bunch of mundane and repetitive tasks over and over again, mistakes are inevitably bound to happen, resulting in negative consequences. Luckily, gone are the days when call center agents had to do everything manually. By automating contact center processes, operations, and workflows, automation tools can eliminate human errors and improve efficiency.
Increased agent productivity
With fewer redundant, manual, time-consuming tasks to handle, agents can focus more on dealing with higher-level tasks and complex customer queries where they can put their talents to good use. That not only increases their productivity but also makes them more engaged, empowered, and satisfied at the workplace. It also allows you to reduce the risk of burnout and the resulting turnover, which has always been a big issue in call centers.
Improved customer satisfaction
Contact center automation tools can handle customer issues independently at any time of day, catering to the needs of those customers who highly value self-service and the ability to resolve issues on their own. In addition, automation enables agents to handle customer interactions faster and more efficiently, which reduces the Average Handle Time (AHT) and increases First Call Resolution (FCR) rates. That ultimately adds to improving the overall customer experience and customer satisfaction.
24/7 customer support
Today’s consumers increasingly demand customer support around the clock. While your support agents can only work for a limited number of hours during the day, AI-powered virtual assistants, voice bots, and chatbots may serve your clients 24/7, allowing you to extend your service hours and support your customers whenever they need it. Automated tools may not be as good as your service reps, but at least they can help your customers resolve basic issues or provide them with the necessary information.
Increased sales and revenue
Automation is critical in outbound call centers that rely on outbound calling to generate revenue. By automating and optimizing the tedious process of dialing numbers manually through the use of auto dialers, call centers can improve the efficiency of outbound calling campaigns. Predictive dialers can additionally minimize agent idle times between calls, which means your sales reps can make more outbound calls in a shorter time, engage with more prospects, and convert more leads.
Decreased operational costs
The ultimate goal of any call center is to reduce operational costs while maintaining the same level of service and profitability. This is where automation can make a difference. It can boost call center efficiency on a large scale, helping you cut down on your operational costs. E.g., automated AI-powered voice bots and self-service chatbots can reduce your overall inbound call volume by dealing with customer issues without the need for human agents. That means fewer agents are needed to handle inbound interactions, reducing your staffing costs.
Automate Your Contact Center Operations with VoiceSpin’s AI Contact Center Software Solutions
If you aren’t yet taking advantage of these contact center automation trends, you might be missing out on lots of opportunities to serve your customers faster and better, improve the experience for your reps, and achieve the maximum operational efficiency of your contact center. With VoiceSpin’s call center automation software, you can streamline many processes and operations. Here’s a quick overview of what exactly you can automate and optimize with VoiceSpin’s contact center solutions:
- IVR and custom call routing: With a multi-level Interactive Voice Response system and custom call routing rules, your inbound calls will always be routed to the right destination, reducing the number of call transfers and repeat calls and ensuring higher FCR rates and CSAT scores.
- AI predictive dialer: With an AI predictive dialer, your sales reps can make more outbound calls in less time, while the dialer’s predictive algorithms intelligently score your leads and connect them to the best-suited sales reps based on the probability of the successful outcome to help you maximize conversions.
- AI chatbots: An AI chatbot can support your customers 24/7, answer FAQs, and help your customers resolve basic issues whenever is convenient for them, without needing to interact with your human reps, extending your support availability, improving CX, and increasing customer satisfaction.
- AI voice bots: An AI voice bot can answer your inbound calls when your customer support reps are not available, help your customers get answers to their questions, and automatically qualify inbound leads, reducing the load on your team and freeing them up to focus on higher-value tasks.
- AI speech analytics: An AI speech analyzer can monitor 100% of your inbound and outbound calls, helping you monitor agent performance, automate the entire call center QA process, and ensure better compliance through instant keyword detection and real-time alerts.
- AI call summary: With AI call summaries, your reps will always have key conversation insights at their fingertips for more efficient follow-ups, while your managers can easily monitor call quality and agent performance without having to read through lengthy transcripts or listen to call recordings.
Book a 30-minute demo to learn more about VoiceSpin’s AI contact center software solutions and how they can help you automate your customer service operations, improve CX, and drive better sales conversions.
Sources:
- https://www.kearney.com/industry/telecommunications/article/-/insights/the-future-of-customer-interaction-the-smart-contact-center
- https://www.probecx.com/en-au/blog/what-is-predictive-call-routing
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/operations-blog/why-ivr-still-matters-in-an-ai-world
- https://www.industryarc.com/Report/18647/voicebots-market.html
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-07-27-gartner-predicts-chatbots-will-become-a-primary-customer-service-channel-within-five-years
- https://www.voicespin.com/glossary/what-is-predictive-dialer/
- https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/predictive-dialer-software-market
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/from-speech-to-insights-the-value-of-the-human-voice
- https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/01/23/2593098/0/en/Speech-Analytics-Market-Is-Expected-To-Create-A-Revenue-Pocket-Of-USD-9-33-Billion-by-2030-Report-by-Market-Research-Future-MRFR.html
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