As attendees engaged in conversations about engaging remote workforces and the importance of employee experience, the irony of discussing these topics at an in-person event was not lost. The consensus among participants was that flexible work arrangements, including hybrid in-office and work-from-home setups, are the future of contact centers.
Accountability is the backbone of quality customer service. When your contact center agents take ownership for their work, they provide higher quality interactions with their customer base. But how can leaders promote accountability within their organization. This article will give you some actionable tips.
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.
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:
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:
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.
IVR’s…love them or hate them, they are an almost ubiquitous part of the contact centre industry and have been around for a very long time. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the first commercial IVR system was built to perform order entry and inventory control back in 1973, although the technology was certainly in its infancy, and considered expensive and difficult to implement.
Since the beginning of 2020 and the inception of COVID-19, contact centers have had to make adjustments as to the way we work and employees’ daily lives. This shift in the workplace proved to be specifically challenging for contact centers and help desks. Agents were used to being in an office and not working virtually. The change to in-person and effectively assisting customers had to take place quickly and efficiently. On any given day, agents might experience more extended workdays due to higher call volume, handling of complicated subjects, and customer complaints, and aggravation.
In the past year, businesses across the world have seen significant disruptions to their daily operations. For many industries, this has meant, changing the way they operate, enabling staff to work from home and trying to keep staff engaged regardless of where they are working from.
Contact centres are always looking for new ways to ensure employee engagement and productivity, especially now that many agents work, at least some of the time, from home. For remote agents especially, it can be more difficult to plug into the culture of the office and stay engaged with the brand without the face to face interaction they would usually have in the contact centre.
One of the most significant challenges that contact centres face is an incredibly high rate of agent turnover, creating a cyclical problem where the Learning and Development team is continuously training new agents for them only to stay with the company for a couple of months. This can be expensive. In this blog, we have four strategies for contact centres that are hoping to retain their agents and reduce turnover.
If you know anything about contact centres, then you know that it can be hit or miss when it comes to how interested (or engaged) an agent is with their caller, or their job for that matter…
The biggest threat to the productivity of a contact centre is a disengaged employee. If your team is disengaged with their work, the performance of your contact centre will suffer dramatically. But what if you were able to make a game out of your employee’s performance?
