For decades the line between home-life and work-life has been blurring. This has only been accelerating as the equation of internet + mobile devices has caused many of us to stay connected well past our “working hours”. It’s a common habit to check your email on your phone as soon as you wake up, and right before you go to bed because you can’t miss a beat. Or maybe you have to “get ready for Monday” by working a few hours on the weekends because work doesn’t let you disconnect. It’s one thing to leverage working from home to provide you the flexibility to work odd hours that benefit your life. It’s a completely different thing to feel like you can’t disconnect and now work is impeding upon your home-life.
Burnout culture isn’t unique to either in-office or at-home employees. However, what is unique for those that work from home is the fact that those blurred lines become even harder to see when you are taking all your meetings, all project work, and all brainstorming from your home. When employees work from home I think it’s critical for leaders to remember that working from home is different. You, as the leader and as a company, are impacting their homes and their families in ways that you don’t when they work in an office. Simply put, working from home is more than just work, it’s personal.
When you work in an office you have a commute that allows you to decompress and process the day a bit. For those of us that are introverts, it gives us an opportunity to recharge and get ready for jumping into family life. However, when you work from home your commute becomes the 20 feet between your office door and the kitchen. You have no downtime to decompress, and this has been especially true when our families are on the other side of the office door and need help with X things before our last meeting is even done.
Not only do you get the benefit of decompressing on the commute home, but so does your family. Instead, when you work from home your family gets the raw consequences of every meeting. There have been plenty of times that my wife has just sat there patiently as I dropped all of my frustrations from the last meeting right into her lap. I may have done that to some extent if I worked in the office, but not as much as I do knowing she’s just on the other side of my office.
Getting it unfiltered like that also means the families become even more invested in the employee’s work environment. When the employee comes out of meetings talking about how they “love working with so-and-so because they ask great questions and keep the meeting on agenda”, it may not be exciting to their family, but you better believe the organization will be perceived as a positive influence on not just the employee but the family as a whole. Of course, when they come out complaining that “so-and-so once again forgot about blah blah blah” their family is more likely to see the organization in a negative light and encourage the employee to leave for something healthier.
Lastly, I think it’s important for leaders to remember that the home is a sacred space, and work, whether welcomed or not, has invaded that space. When our direct reports turn on their cameras and we see their homes we see another part of who they are. We get to know them better, and to some extent, they have become vulnerable because of it. They may be embarrassed that they don’t have a dedicated space and instead you are in their kitchen seeing every dirty dish in the sink. They may not have mentioned before they play board games every Monday night, but now you can see all +50 games on the shelves behind them. And while you may love getting to see their kids and dogs every day, they feel like you think less of them because they are constantly being interrupted. Working from home turns “why don’t we meet in the conference room to discuss” into “why don’t I come to your dining room table and we can chat about this while your kids ask ‘what’s for dinner’”.
Working from home is amazing and has helped many of us create a more personalized work/life balance. However, as leaders, we must remember that the nature of our relationship with our direct reports, their families, and their homes changes when they work from home. We must remember that working from home is more than just work, it’s personal.
With all the layoffs in the news, your team may be assuming the worst. In a challenging environment, those assumptions are additional stress that your team doesn’t need.
It was only 90 days ago that we found out Twitter was laying off roughly half of its workforce, and the layoff stories haven’t stopped since then. Meta, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft of course make headlines, and we all know of smaller scale (but still painful) layoffs within the contact center industry– we’ve got the posts on our LinkedIn timelines to prove it. A friend of mine directed me to Layoffstracker.com but a quick online search reveals many more layoff tracking sites, all showing the grim timeline. And even though I try to avoid doomscrolling in general, it sometimes seems like that’s the only kind of scrolling there is.
Every day my news feed brings another clickbait anecdote about how employees laid off from Google feel particularly poorly treated, either because of the way their termination was handled, or because they feel like they company saw them as “disposable”, or because of the perceived randomness of who got picked for a pink slip. The stories range from a new mother who received her layoff email hours after giving birth, to married couples who went from two incomes to none, to employees with 20 years of service getting a mass email instead of a call. I don’t mean to single out Google, but I do think their status as a household word has made them a particular focus in the media. Meanwhile, the employees who still have jobs are confused and upset, some suffering from survivor’s guilt.
On top of all that, some companies are announcing plans to pull remaining employees back into the office whether they like it or not. So many of us have come to value the flexibility that a work from home situation has afforded us. And while some employees say they’re fine with a hybrid home/office scenario, there’s something about the stories of large companies mandating that move that rubs a lot of employees the wrong way. A study by Monster shows that two-thirds of workers would quit if forced to return to the office! Hearing stories about large, well-known companies announcing the end or partial reduction of Work from Home is just another factor that is likely weighing on the minds of your team.
That level of stress isn’t just the employees’ problem though; the whole organization has a stake. Research confirms something that we see in colleagues and also feel in ourselves on a personal level: stress has an impact on productivity. Stressed employees are more likely to be absent, and more likely to exhibit presenteeism (which means that they sign in for work, but are less productive because of physical illness or mental stressors). You don’t need a study to tell you that stressed employees find it more difficult to focus on creating schedules, interacting positively with their co-workers, or delivering the kind of “delight” level experience that customers demand today.
Employee wellbeing has been a trending topic that is growing out of the overall interest in Employee Experience (EX). Most of us are on board with the idea that EX is important, not just because we care about our colleagues as fellow human beings. Our companies have a real material stake in EX because it impacts Customer Experience (CX), and ultimately the bottom line. So our companies have to have a real interest in employee mental wellbeing.
Maybe your company isn’t planning layoffs and you’re happy allowing employees to work from home. But is that something your teams know? Is it something they have a gut feeling to be true? The current economic climate, the layoff news, the ratio of tough calls to easy ones– it all makes now a great time to check in with your team.
Make time to meet with your team, treat that time as sacred.
One thing we’ve always said about the contact center is that you can always expect the unexpected. We’re already facing a staffing crisis, doing our best with the employees we’ve got. And then there are the unpredicted contact volume spikes, the unplanned absences, the many customer service fires that break out during the day. In spite of all this, meetings have to be treated as critical priorities. Making time to talk to your team as a group and as individuals sends a clear message that they matter. Feeling like easily-replaceable cogs in an uncaring machine is a common complaint in the tech company layoffs, and we don’t want that contagious feeling spreading to our teams.
Communicate what you can.
So your company may not even be considering layoffs or cutting off Work from Home. Even if that’s true, you can’t make promises that it would never happen, especially in this economic climate. Focus on what you can communicate with honesty. If upper management has given out any messages on this topic, share what you can. Thinking back to my time as a frontline agent, I might have taken messages from upper management with a grain of salt, but I still appreciated some transparency from my team leaders, even if they couldn’t make promises.
Ask them how they feel.
Most of us have one-on-ones that are scheduled as frequently as we can manage given the massive workload we have to deal with. Talking to our team members about goals, stats, and key performance indicators is certainly important, that’s a given. But can you make time in those meetings to mention the layoff elephant in the room, and ask just how your team member is feeling? This kind of communication can build a sense of trust, openness to collaboration, and a sense of being valued. Don’t underestimate the power of making a team member feel seen.
Listen actively.
It’s not a given that any of us can easily focus in a meeting, especially in a multitasking world. But making the time with a team member count is crucial. Actively listen to you what your team member is saying, don’t spend that time formulating a response. Make them feel safe to be as honest as they can, and be attentive to non-verbal cues that might tell a story of their own. This is especially important when bringing up a topic like the layoff trend. Active listening can go a long way to building trust and a feeling of partnership between you and your team.
Follow up.
Team members are a rich source of insight into the employee experience. If your team is telling you about layoff fears or any other stressor making it difficult to deliver great customer experience, listen and follow up. If there are causes of stress that your company can do something about, make sure that message is communicated to the right people. Then make sure to let your team know that they have been heard and their concerns have been made known to the decision makers.
Consider a Voice of the Employee (VoE) tool.
With more concern shown to Employee Engagement, we’ve seen many VoE solutions hit the market. Some of them measure employee sentiment by doing regular automated “How are you feeling” surveys that can run far more often than any of us could possibly schedule face to face meetings. These scores and survey results can become another valuable data point that gives insight into Employee Experience that is trackable in our performance dashboards. And it gives the team members another channel to tell us how they feel.
Nature hates a void, and that goes double for an informational void. Something will fill the empty space left by that lack of information, and because of human nature, it’s usually our worst assumptions. Don’t let the rumor mill interfere with the hard work you’ve invested into building your contact center operation. Now is a great time to check in with your team to let them know you feel some of same stresses they do, you’re listening, and you’ll be as transparent as you can be in these challenging times.
This is the Koko Crater. One of the many trails, mountains, and craters my family and I hiked on our recent trip to Hawaii.
The length is manageable, between 1.4-1.6 miles depending on which website you look at. But it isn’t the length that gets you, it’s the +1000 steps and 900 feet of elevation gain that will destroy your legs.
My wife was the one that did most of the research and planning for our trip and she was excited to try it. “I hear the views are beautiful!” – Sarah “Right, but there’s no way we are making it up that thing” – Me
We had to change some of our plans that morning and so we pulled into the parking lot way too late in the day. “This sun is going to destroy us” but we still started the hike.
The tree-lined and paved path up to the trailhead is no problem at all. However, the people coming back were a bit concerning. The amount of sweat and hard breathing they are doing made me a bit nervous. And that was them coming down, not going up!
“I really don’t think we have a shot of finishing this thing!” but we still kept moving forward.
We got to the bottom of the stairs and took in exactly how high up we’ll be going and how many steps we’ll be covering. I hadn’t seen the numbers before then and every step looked like it would do us in.
“Babe, one of us is going to end up in the hospital, if we do this” but we still started the climb.
Blame it on my negative mindset. Blame it on the late-day sun and lack of water. Blame it on the moody teenagers that didn’t want to go on a hike. You can blame it on whatever you like but the fact of the matter is we got about 0.3 miles into the 1.6 and decided we had seen enough. Our Low Country lungs and sedentary lifestyle had finally caught up to us and we turned back to the car.
But before we turned back, we stopped. My wife looked up to see what could have been. My girls looked down to see what we had accomplished. All of us took a second to think about how the day could have been more. More relaxing in the hotel, more hiking up this crater, more water, more shade, more energy, more… but we still tried.
And as I already shared, that’s the lesson of the story, you still try.
Yes, there’s a good chance you don’t have the skills they are looking for and they might not ask for an interview. You still apply.
Yes, your company has never paid well, and you don’t think they’ll give you the raise you want. You still ask.
Yes, you aren’t seeing the results you want from your projects and things are moving too slowly. You still push for change.
Would it have been amazing to get to the top of Koko Crater and take in the views? Yes! I’ve seen the pictures and it looks beautiful. But honestly, I’m glad we at least tried.
I’m glad that we saw the crazy amount of stairs in person and appreciated how hard of a hike that trail is. I’m glad that my girls have something to tackle and overcome if they ever head back to Oahu. Most importantly, I’m glad that we tried to do something hard and failed.
Sometimes I think that accomplishing our tasks softens just how hard the challenge was for us. By finally getting the job, or the raise, or the change we wanted we forget how hard it really was. I think sometimes failure is necessary for us to see how far we can push ourselves and appreciate that hard things are hard.
Our hike was challenging, and we didn’t even make it close to the top, but I still have these pictures and this story that I find valuable. I still benefited from the experience and appreciate what we were able to accomplish.
I doubt my girls have internalized all the life lessons from our trip yet, but I’m hopeful this seed was planted in them. Sometimes things are too big for you, and you won’t be able to overcome them, and yet you still try.
Amazing, scary, or both? ChatGPT has created a firestorm of attention since it was made public last November, gaining one million users in just the first week after its launch. ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot from OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company. Their ChatGPT chatbot allows users to engage with OpenAI’s artificial intelligence technology. It can write poetry (amazing!) as well as blog content (scary! speaking as a human who creates content) as well as texts, songs, software code, and so on, using machine learning to generate human-like text.
I’m guessing that a lot of us had the same first thought, “How good can it really be? Can it really write as well as a human?” Judging by the example of ChatGPT output that I’ve presented below, my answers are, “Pretty darn good,” and “Not yet.” Your mileage may vary. For anyone who hasn’t tried it already, I encourage you can go to OpenAI’s website and ask ChatGPT a question. For those of us who have been contact center professionals for years, our second thought might very well be, “What impact could this have on the contact center?”
Contact centers are already deploying chatbots for many reasons: call deflection, the desire to automate contacts that humans find crushingly repetitive, or just to accommodate customers who want an automated experience. But we all have anecdotal evidence that those chatbot experiences are not always successful. One of my colleagues was just yesterday relating a story of a chatbot CX experience that led her to a dead end with no answers and no options to continue on another channel, let alone reach a human agent. Could ChatGPT be different?
Signs point to yes: ChatGPT makes use of generative artificial intelligence, trained on gigantic amounts of text data that taught it to recognize patterns. Its algorithm utilizes supervised learning to potentially provide customers with fast answers that are relevant to their queries. But ChatGPT can surpass traditional chatbots with its capability to learn and adapt to new customer demands and a fast-changing contact center industry.
But don’t just take my word for it, let’s hear what ChatGPT has to say for itself. I’m not the first person to drop some actual ChatGPT-authored content into an article, but I did give it the prompt to write an article specifically about ChatGPT in the Contact Center:
ChatGPT and the Contact Center: Revolutionizing Customer Service
In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the customer service industry has been on the rise. One of the most promising AI models for this purpose is ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT has the ability to understand and respond to natural language text, making it a valuable tool for automating customer service in the contact center.
One of the main advantages of using ChatGPT in the contact center is its ability to handle a wide range of customer inquiries. With its vast knowledge base and natural language understanding capabilities, ChatGPT can understand and respond to customer questions and concerns, regardless of their complexity. This eliminates the need for customers to navigate through automated phone menus or wait on hold for a live agent, saving them valuable time and increasing their overall satisfaction.
It should be noted that ChatGPT is not a complete replacement for human agents, but rather it can work alongside them to improve their performance. Agents can still be available to handle more complex issues, while ChatGPT can handle the more routine inquiries. This approach allows companies to reduce the number of agents needed, while still providing high-quality customer service.
In conclusion, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the customer service industry by providing efficient and accurate responses to customer inquiries. Its ability to handle multiple conversations, understand natural language text, and gather valuable customer data make it a valuable tool for the contact center. As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see more companies adopting ChatGPT and other AI models to improve their customer service operations.
Not a bad take on the subject. ChatGPT pulled together some important points about the potential benefits to Customer Experience. Crucially, it included a concept that might offer some comfort to many readers, that ChatGPT is not a “complete” replacement for human agents. If I were writing that article myself, I would not in the same paragraph make that statement and then talk about reducing headcount. I would rather focus on the idea that Employee Experience could be improved and all the benefits that come with better EX— better CX, better agent wellbeing, lower attrition, and a list of additional things that could fill up a whole blog article by themselves.
Along those same lines of not completely replacing human agents, it was the CEO of OpenAI himself who tweeted:
With some eminent thinkers warning us that tools like ChatGPT will eventually impact the demand for knowledge workers, Altman’s tweet may not relieve our anxiety. He’s correct, though. Today’s version of ChatGPT has some issues, not the least of which is factual errors in its answers to direct questions. It also has a problem it shares with other AI tools, which is that it inherits bias from its training data. But going back to my co-worker’s actual CX problem with one company’s chatbot, could she have been any more dissatisfied with a flat-toned, over-written response from the current version of ChatGPT?
At least for now, ChatGPT is not a replacement for human writing that has the ring of authenticity—or for a human agent who is empowered to be a brand ambassador for their company. Tools like ChatGPT will continue to evolve and improve their ability to take care of some customer needs, and that’s great. They will likely grow to be amazing tools for the contact center. It’s that growth of AI tools that makes it even more important for us to treat our agents like humans who need to be recognized for their efforts, rewarded for caring about their customers, and nurtured with the training, support, and empowering tools (one which could be a descendant of ChatGPT) they need to do their best work.
Throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to lead and network with some amazing individuals and from time to time they have asked what it takes to move from Manager to Director. I think it’s one of the hardest transitions.
I’ve seen plenty of individual contributors get promoted to managers, not because they are solid leaders but because they are great contributors. They know what buttons to push, what processes to work through, and how to execute the role. Because of this, they see their value add to the organization in doing and executing vs. delegating or casting vision and this makes the transition into a director-level role incredibly challenging.
At a director level, or above, you need to be more comfortable delegating than doing. More comfortable making decisions than giving proposals, or possibly casting vision vs. following a direction. That isn’t to say those other skills aren’t still valuable and an important role in any job. However, the priority of these skills pivots and suddenly decision making > giving proposals, for example.
Here are a few tips that I’ve given to people looking to make the jump from Manager to Director.
One: Serve Your Team
The most important thing you need to know about leadership is that your primary job is to serve your team. Period. Bottom line. Notice that I didn’t say “directing is that your primary job…” or “managing” or even “holding people accountable…”. This can be applied at all levels, even as a manager, but the point is that you are there to serve.
What does that look like? It means keeping them informed of the larger trends in the organization they might not be aware of. Helping them see how their efforts are connected to the larger picture and the wins of the organization. Protecting them from outside forces that are toxic or counter-cultural to what you’re trying to achieve. Serving your team means that you realize they don’t work for you but you work for them and that means their success is more important than your own.
Two: Ask Questions and Listen
One of the greatest mistakes that new directors can make is thinking that they now need to have all the answers. People are coming to them to make decisions, and as I already highlighted decision making > giving proposals. Decision making is important but the best way to make decisions is to not just assume you have the right perfect answer out of the gate.
As a leader and director, you need to make sure you’re asking questions and lots of them. You likely aren’t in the weeds like you used to be and you also have a limited purview, we all do. So you need to take two steps 1) ask questions and 2) actually listen. Don’t listen to confirm your original answer. Don’t listen to poke holes and show weaknesses in the answers given. Listen to understand and see the issue from another person’s perspective. You likely know your perspective backward and forwards, but you need to do the heavy lifting of trying to see from another person’s perspective. That only happens when we get comfortable asking questions and then actually listening.
Three: Pull Your Head Up
As an individual contributor, and as a manager, you likely added value by looking down. Looking at your particular job and executing it well. Looking in on your team and meeting the needs of your direct reports. As a director though, you need to pull your head up and look around. This isn’t to say you stop paying attention to your team (see above about serving and listening!), but as a director you need to stop only looking at your team and consider the larger lay of the land.
You need to lift your head up and see how your team is interacting with other teams and how they are perceived amongst those teams. You need to lift your head up and see where you and your team sit in your field. Are you on the cutting edge or way behind, or do you even have access to what others are doing in your field? You need to lift your head up and try to understand where your team, organization, and field are going. What’s up next and how are you and your team going to get there? As a director you need to get comfortable casting vision and to do that you need to be looking towards a horizon, not at the details of the ground in front of you.
Moving from a manager to a director is hard. It’s a large pivot, that requires new skills, especially if leadership wasn’t a focus in your manager role. However, if you realize that what made you successful as a manager won’t make you successful as a director, then you are taking the first steps to jump to director!
As we get back to work for the start of 2023, we do so not only with familiar 2022 challenges still hanging around, but with the added prospect of economic downturn looming ahead. While a possible recession could have us asking if we can afford the very best contact center performance, we should be asking if we can afford not to make the contact center a top priority. Let’s look at the dawn of 2023 as an opportunity to face uncertainty and volatility with some resolutions to make the contact center thrive.
Resolution 1 – Fight the Recession with Great Customer Experience
The last few months have seen multiplying predictions of a slowing economy coming in 2023; but rather than waiting to react, it’s a chance to be proactive when it comes to Customer Experience. The competition for customer loyalty has been fierce enough even before we had the specter of a downturn. As consumers tighten their budgets, customer retention will be determined to an ever larger extent by the highest level of Customer Experience (CX).
Customers now demand to be met on the channel of their choice with an excellent, personalized experience. Great experiences build lasting customer relationships, while substandard experiences are now more likely than ever to not only end a relationship, they’re also more likely to be shared on social media. While personalization and omnichannel integration used to be nice-to-have items on many contact centers’ wish lists, 2023 customers will see them as must-haves.
Customers have become accustomed to algorithms anticipating their desired content and will hardly put up with unnecessarily long interactions where they aren’t recognized or have to repeat themselves over and over. They expect that their complex customer journeys are seamless from your website and across multiple contact channels.
The good news is that for contact centers, these journeys present not only a larger range of ways to reach your customers, but also a chance to track omnichannel interactions and gain insights into who your customers are and what they want. Mining this valuable data gives you the ability to create initiatives for even more personalized customer experiences.
A crucial part of that personalization is not just an omnichannel technical solution, but also successful, smart interactions on every channel– especially when an agent is required. The foundation of great Customer Experience is equally great Employee Experience, ensuring that agents are happy and fulfilled at work. Which brings us to our next resolution:
Resolution 2 – Invest in your Employees
Fully empowered employees at every level are the best pro-active way to ensure a positive customer experience
In 2022 we couldn’t get away from stories about the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting; they really got the conversation going about Employee Experience. Will 2023 be the year that contact center employees are universally recognized as the critical assets they can be? Even with all the capabilities of a powerful omnichannel technological solution at your disposal, today’s customers aren’t satisfied by a live interaction with an agent who is disengaged, doesn’t have answers at their disposal, or conducts the entire interaction from a generic script. Fully empowered employees at every level are the best pro-active way to ensure a positive customer experience: happy agents create better experiences for customers, informed supervisors manage their teams to success, insightful WFM analysts generate the accurate forecasts and optimal schedules that enable the center to run efficiently.
However, they all must be recognized as value creators, critical to your ability to deliver great CX. Once this recognition becomes part of your culture from front line to C-suite, your organization can understand that your employees are the best place to invest– especially in times of economic turmoil. This means giving your employees the tools that enable them to perform at the highest level and meet your customers where they want to be met. Plus, customers want to be met with contextual information needed to create personalized experiences, and with the answers needed for real resolution.
And we’re not talking about agents only. The need for the right toolset includes all of your employees including agents, team leads, executives, and the WFM team. Agents can benefit from AI-assisted Knowledge Management that gives them the guidance they need when they need it. Team leads need Gamification/Performance Management that helps them coach effectively and reward top performers. And the WFM Team can take advantage of Workforce Management solutions that automate manual tasks, freeing the team to think strategically and focus on transformative processes like truly flexible scheduling.
Similar to the omnichannel routing solutions, technology can be a great thing, but to get the best Employee Experience, you must also invest in the human side of the equation. Without the right training to make the technology come to life, we can’t achieve the level of true transformational change needed for the coming year. And just as personalization is expected by customers, employees want an experience that fits their needs, such as customized expert training that can be delivered online on on-site where needed, digital training that is available online anytime employees need it, or AI-assisted training delivery systems that automatically send the module that an agent needs at the time that’s best for the agent and also protects service level.
But when it comes to transformation that makes a real difference and gets attention at the highest levels of your organization, you’ve got to aim for the right target:
Resolution 3 – Move from Optimization to Transformation
For CX and EX in the coming year, not only is there room for optimism—it’s a must. As the economic environment changes, we must have the resolve to change in substantive ways to meet the challenges that 2023 will bring. According to a BCG survey from November 2022, a majority of organizations plan to increase their investments in digital transformation in spite of the fact that they complain that they don’t receive help in prioritizing the steps of transformation. The first step has to be committing to transformation that creates a new level of EX and CX, not just reinforcing existing processes.
Investing in the best Workforce Management tools may give our WFM team the ability to game out new scheduling strategies, but without the will to actually implement the best of those scheduling strategies, there’s no transformative flexibility to improve employee engagement with better work/life balance. Having the best performance scorecards, fully connected to Quality Management and other important systems is a powerful achievement in itself, but without the commitment to act on those insights with coaching and meaningful recognition for top performers, there is no moving the needle on Customer Experience in a way that goes beyond business as usual.
Digital-based training is always there when needed, but if training isn’t aligned with the WFM team so that it’s delivered automatically at the best-possible time, there’s no transformative increase in employee experience coupled with the protection of customer experience. And beyond the inbound front office, just think of opportunities for efficiency and performance gains that might be achieved by extending the transformation strategies and WEM tools into the outbound and back office areas. Simply put, don’t just add technology without the right mindset for change. With the right cultural commitment to innovation, everyone can feel connected to the transformation effort, being fully aware of the key role they play in making the organization a great place to work and a trusted partner for its customers.
These are just three possible resolutions for new year. We’re already a week into 2023, and maybe not all of our resolutions are getting off to a great start, but one area where we can’t afford to fail is finding new levels of success in the contact center. There’s nothing inherently magical about the start of the new year, it simply gives us a convenient point to try something new. But we can make it special by committing to being proactive in preparing for whatever 2023 might have in store for us.
If you’re looking for ways to make your contact center even better this year, Call Design can help. We’ve got the tools and consulting skills to make your resolutions a reality, whether you’re looking to move from spreadsheets to an automatable Forecasting/Scheduling solution, searching for a CX platform that enables better customer experiences, or meaningful ways to improve agent engagement for better employee experience.
Workforce management tools are vital to contact centers, but there’s little point investing in a WFM solution if your staff don’t know how to use it. Programs like Call Design’s Workforce Management Essentials course provide insight and additional knowledge.
Positive customer experiences are critical to cultivating a loyal following for your business. What are the key areas contact centers should be focusing on to create the best possible experience for their customers? Let’s take a look at the two golden rules and how Call Design can help.
Call Design is aware of the recently identified log4j2 vulnerability and has reviewed our internal, our Hosted systems and customer solutions as well as the leading products that we support.
Following a detailed technical review supported by system scans, we have determined that our systems and products either do not use log4j2 at all, do not use the log4j2 core file that contains the vulnerability or do not use the JDNI functionality.
Please contact Call Design via your account executive, Helpdesk representative or technical support person if you have specific questions related to an individual system.
