What 2024 CX Trends should we expect. What tech will drive CX forward? We asked CX tech executives in a new 3-part series. First up is Charles Hicks. Hicks is a leader of CX Partnerships at Zoom. He’s an explorer of new and exciting markets and has over twenty years of experience in product development, operations, consulting, sales, and marketing.

Read Part 2 with Ginger Conlon of Genesys and download the free 2024 CX Trends Report for the full rundown.

Q1: What will be the hottest 2024 CX trends and why?

AI-powered CX – from using LLM’s to write email copy, to algorithmic workforce scheduling, to expert assist / agent assist tools reducing training times and increasing agent effectiveness.  Why?  These tools have seen increasing usage over the last few years, but vendors are getting better at productizing them and promoting their benefits.  These advanced capabilities are also being driven down-market into segments that were previously inaccessible.  Additionally the financial benefits of replacing hard to hire/retain frontline workers with a mix of automation, AI and more skilled agents are complete no-brainers for businesses looking to do more with less.

Q2: How does this CX tech trend address a problem for CX leaders, and what are the symptoms of that problem?

Hiring, training and retaining frontline workers continues to be one of the largest costs categories for CX leaders.  Symptoms of this problem are high turnover, low customer satisfaction, and job reqs that never close.

If you haven’t worked in a contact center before, it’s quite a different environment.  Employees are constantly monitored, coached, and held accountable for performance and quality violations.  

The closest similar job would be an Amazon delivery driver.  Remember how they had to pee in bottles because they didn’t have enough scheduled breaks on their route?  Same problem in the contact center.  Grueling working conditions, constant harassment by supervisors, and very little chance of upward promotion.

Because of these factors, contact center agents are one of the few industries that has been in steady decline for the last 10 years.  Additionally, because they are considered cost centers by many companies, the managers routinely hire low skilled workers that are between jobs and are just using their contact center job as a temporary stop-gap while they look for a more rewarding career.

The work is also repetitive, some agents handling as many as 100 calls per day, having to repeat the same terrible advice or promotions to customers even though they know the customers won’t attach to their offer.

Here are some nice stats from the bureau of labor statistics that show the starting salary is just barely above minimum wage, and the hiring trend is declining 5% YoY.

Additionally, from a management perspective, you can spend 3-6 months hiring and training employees, only to have them churn in the first year.  Spending 3 months on training only to have an employee productive for 6-9 months before quitting has a major impact on contact center economics.  This makes for a workplace culture that some may consider toxic, overbearing, or inhumane.

Hiring, onboarding and training costs are fixed per employee, so a higher rate of churn equates to higher employee management costs.  Below is an example of the major cost categories for a small contact center (60-ish agents), including software, personnel, management, telecom and facilities.  The overall efficiency of a contact center can be measured with the “cost-per-inquiry” or “cost-per-ticket” metric below.  This is just a sum of all costs divided by the sum of all inquiries / calls handled by the contact center.

Cost Per Support Ticket Estimator
Annual Costs	Agents	Cost	Fringe Benefits	Fringe	Total	% of Total	Notes
1. Westlake Agent Costs	13	$50,000	20%	$10,000	$780,000	34%
2. Mexico Agent Costs	29	$20,000	10%	$2,000	$638,000	28%
3. Mexico Overflow Agent Costs	25	$10,000	10%	$1,000	$275,000	12%
4. Westlake Management Overhead	1	$75,000	20%	$15,000	$90,000	4%
4. Mexico Management Overhead	1	$40,000	10%	$4,000	$44,000	2%
4. Technology Licenses (agent software including CRM, WFM, etc.)	67	$4,500			$301,500	13%	Assuming some licenses are shared.
5. Telecom expense					$30,000	1%
6. Facilities expense (may be pro-rata if space is shared with non-support personnel)					$100,000	4%
7. Training, travel, office supplies					$50,000	2%
Grand Total					$2,308,500	100%
Annual Ticket Volume	126,000
Cost per Ticket	$18.32
Assumptions

Q3: How will this dynamically change CX leader outcomes? What about organizational outcomes?

Budgets for CX areas will shift dollars from frontline personnel to software and back-office personnel. In the above cost breakdown, personnel make up 55% of the total spend for the contact center, and these costs scale LINEARLY.  If you want to handle more calls, like say during a peak season, you need to add agents.  

With automation and AI, we can reduce the size of level 1 / first line teams, replacing them with a virtual agent that has a fixed and predictable cost and won’t churn or quit.  

Contact center operators are able to offer 24 x 7 coverage and handle seasonal spikes without major projects to hire and onboard short-term agents, or outsource some volume to a contract customer contact center operator / BPO.

Q4: Will there be major barriers to implementation, and what will those be?

For all of these AI based tools to work you need data to drive the models, and you need a place to surface the AI recommendations and insights into the agent workspace / workflow. The correct data to source, depends on the AI model you are trying to use.  

For example, If you want to recommend complementary products or services using AI, you’ll need customer demographic data and purchase data mashed up and fed through some kind of AI model.

Most of the AI capabilities that Zoom is building out are conversational in nature, we call them conversational intelligence.  For example, instead of supervisors listening to calls to catch quality issues, we can have AI transcribe the calls and identify areas of frustration based on metrics like talk/listen ratio and sentiment analysis.

The major transformation in the contact center is similar to the industrial revolution of agriculture, in which manual labor was largely replaced by mechanization.  We are seeing the same trend here, and there are roughly 22 million contact center agents in the world today.

Leaders need to act now by consolidating their communications stacks onto a modern platform like Zoom offers and integrate the data that’s critical for their customer experience into their operational systems and AI models.

The most visionary CXO’s will take inventory of their customer journey and re-imagine it with these new technologies and capabilities, creating a vision and roadmap for the CX of the future.

Migrating to more modern, open systems that allow for ease of data integration will also simplify the activation of AI-enhanced business processes.

2024 CX Trends Series

You’re reading Part 1: How AI will unburden call centers.

Read Part 2: AI Unlocks Customer Personalization

Read Part 3: AI Brings Value to Owned Data