Rising technology spending should be a cause for celebration. Yet, many contact centers are keeping the champagne on ice as concerns for the future grow.
Indeed, while 81 percent of contact centers reveal their annual software budgets have increased, almost half (48 percent) do not feel "very prepared" for the future.
These worries seemingly stem from not having the right technology and/or strategy to improve business results, despite increased budgets and spending.
As such, a paradox emerges in which technology investments rise, but customer and business outcomes fail to lift.
Further findings - as revealed in a recent Observe.AI report, entitled: "State of Contact Center Conversation Intelligence 2022" – pinpoint underperforming agents as another prominent cause for this future pessimism.
Shockingly, as many as 22 percent of contact centers believe that most agents perform far below expectations and the standards set by leading performers.
Such findings underline the increased relevance of conversational intelligence tools, which can enhance agent performance management, according to Swapnil Jain, CEO and Co-Founder of Observe.AI. He stated:
Whether a contact center’s focus is on service, sales, or both, visibility into agent-customer interactions is key to accelerating workflows that drive revenue and growth.
However, contact centers must proceed with caution. Adding spreadsheets and word processing documents to analyze interactions can create confusion, which is already widespread in an industry bogged down by unscientific methods and tool juggling.
Supporting this notion is a statistic suggesting that seven in every ten operations use two or more tools for conversation analysis, forcing operators to switch from solution to solution.
