The contact center industry has dynamically changed over the past ten years and continues to evolve to keep up with the increasing marketplace competition as well as the growing demands of customers. Remarkably, technology developments have allowed contact centers to look into wider options to improve their services such as moving into cloud-based systems.

Contact centers using cloud-based applications have showed significant growth from 31.8% in 2010 and 40.9% in 2011 to 62.4% this year. And with the numbers rising, it shows no signs of slowing down.

The latter percentage uses 45 different types of systems and applications, where the top priority for contact centers in the next 18 months are:

Interactive Voice Response
Automatic Call Distributor
Computer Telephony Integration
Workforce Management
Speech Recognition
Customer Relationship Management
Dialer
Web Chat
Recording
Quality Management
Email response management
Performance management
Social CRM servicing applications
Social media listening/monitoring tools

DMG Consulting projects that there will be a 10% increase (from 35% to 45%) in the cloud-based contact center infrastructure each year from 2012 to 2015. With the security and integration well covered by cloud-based vendors, this figure might double as it presents a more feasible and reliable solution for businesses.

Social media will not replace email, voice, and chat

The next 18 months predict that voice and email will be the top contact center servicing channels at 14.9% and 14.4% respectively. Social media, particularly Facebook (7.9%) and Twitter (7.8%), prove to be an efficient channel to reach customers. However, even with its popularity in providing good customer service, social media will not overtake the regular contact center servicing channels such as web chat (12.7%), web self-service (10.6%), SMS (9.3%), mobile (8.9%), and instant messaging (8.6%). Nearly 4.7% of contact centers will utilize the use of video while 0.1% will try to use other means aside from what has been mentioned.

Many companies expect cloud based contact centers to yield improvements such as: agent productivity (55.8%), increase in the use of self-service solutions (45.1%), utilization of more channels such as SMS and social media (40.8%), reduction in service costs (38%), and boost in their reports and analysis (29.6%).