We asked members about the past year and their thoughts about the new year. This question was: In your opinion, what has been the greatest challenge the contact center industry has faced in the last 12 months?

Read what some of them told us! 

"Keeping up with the technology trends and trying to find what is in it for me or my company."

"I have found that many organizations including my own are struggling with the balance between contact center efficiency and professionalism vs. authentic and more casual interactions."

"Utilizing Artificial Intelligence as a tool for the quality monitoring of customer interactions. AI-derived knowledge from all your calls combined with a human touch will push the success of your customer interaction. Some of the biggest advantages of artificial intelligence that call centers can benefit from are speech analysis, predictive analytics and optimization of current contact center approach. Artificial Intelligence is the next step to managing your call center, and maintaining the level of success that your customers have come to expect. We believe that as early adopters continue honing AI applications with Human Intelligence, call monitoring will become more widely applied."

"The contact center industry is growing rapidly across the globe, producing opportunities but also challenges. The client needs and demands have changed dramatically over the past 12 months, specifically around globalization capabilities. Companies are looking to contact centers for global, multi-language support at a competitive price.
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"Attracting and retaining qualified employees - primarily among customer-facing staff but also supervisory/managerial employees and technical support staff.
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"Some of the challenges faced are High Attrition Rate,Changing Geo-political Scenario,Increasing Client Expectations,Lower Employee Engagement,Tight Budgets and Client Attrition."

"The transition to self service continues unabated with AI and chat bots increasingly providing customers with on line solutions. However, it is often used as a cost saver rather than a customer solution and contact centres are still wrestling with 'best practice'"

"Recruitment working together with Training is the greatest challenge. Recruiting the right agents and Training agents in order to deliver effective service to customers."

"2017 was a year of reckoning for the contact centre industry, as the impact of automation started to be felt deeply. Technology has caused many in the industry to rethink their skill-sets to adapt to the brave new world of customer service."

"The biggest challenge that enterprise contact centers faced in 2017 was the decline in the quality of customer experience (CX) they were delivering. According to Forrester’s Annual CX Index Study, the number of scores in the “excellent” category in CX quality fell to ZERO, and twice as many brand scores fell as rose. Moreover, losses in CX performance were bigger than gains."

"Digitalization"

"Frustration with overly structured automated systems or long agent wait times at a time when the publicity over AI suggests this isn't necessary."

"With the explosion of smart phone and smart gadget, contact center is facing great challenge in keeping pace with the new communication and promotion tools to catch the attention of new generation of customers. Contact center also need to digitalize all the customer and market information in order to have an efficient management of data utilization for further business development"

"I believe it's the view that AI technology that will slowly replace basic contact center functions and particularly small-medium-sized call center firms are having a hard time to come up with innovative technology driven solutions or simply how to adapt various technological advancements in their services."

"Dealing with all of the variables now facing Contact Centres and primarily the Omnichannel."

"Rising customer expectations was the largest challenge of 2017. The modern consumer expects companies to meet them on the channels of communication they already use. Companies need to support social media, chat, voice, SMS, and more channels in an effort to meet expectations. At the same time, each channel needs to maintain an exceptional service level. For small, medium, and enterprise companies alike, this proves to be a continuing challenge."