Almost half of the contact center agents don’t have the skills they need to deal with the current demands of their job – according to Calabrio’s recent State of the Contact Centre report.
To make matters worse, progress doesn’t appear to be on the horizon as managers can’t agree on the necessary path of training that would rectify the situation.
Visibility is the answer, and conversational intelligence solutions are the knights in shining armor, spotlighting critical areas for agent development.
Yet, these solutions offer much more than that. They also shed light on broken processes, contact center demand drivers, customer sentiment, and much more.
The following five use cases showcase their versatility and emphasize how service leaders can leverage the tech to bolster crucial customer, agent, and business outcomes.
1. Tag Interactions With Intents Automatically
The best contact centers often strategize over their most prominent contact reasons or “intents”.
Such strategies include implementations of self-service, conversational AI, and automation to address common demand drivers and drive the anticipated ROI.
However, thanks to agents manually logging these intents, without sufficient time or coaching, those strategies often fail to meet expectations.
Conversational intelligence solutions that automate tagging, gather accurate intent data, and dashboard it, ensure contact centers can lay the foundations for improvement initiatives.
Moreover, that data may support CX teams in pinpointing customer journey pain points, workforce management teams in perfecting their forecasting and scheduling, and coaches in delivering targeted and personalized coaching. (More on this below!).
2. Embrace Quality Automation
Thanks to conversational intelligence engines, contact centers can draw insights from every conversation, automatically identifying how effective individuals are in dealing with different elements of an interaction across customer touchpoints.
As such, contact centers can understand where improvements can be made, with metadata attached for further analysis.
Previously, many contact centers attempted to do this via the time-consuming completion of manual evaluation forms.
However, now contact centers can assess the performance of live and virtual agents on a much deeper level – and hone in on contacts that likely present the best learning opportunities.
Yet, the tool also showcases which agents typically perform best across specific intents.
Now this is excellent for reward and recognition. But, as Scott Budding, Manager of Sales Engineering at Calabrio, also noted:
“By diving into how the best agents handle specific interactions, the contact center can create new case management flows and tailored coaching programs, so the rest of the team follows their lead.”
Moreover, contact centers can run several other performance-improving initiatives with Auto-QA. These range from keeping tabs on new agent proficiency to informing new contact routing and automation strategies.
The possibilities are boundless!
3. Measure First Contact Resolution (Accurately!)
First contact resolution (FCR) and short wait times are the two “most important factors” for customers when contacting customer service – according to ContactBabel.
As such, FCR is a mission-critical metric for contact centers to track. The only trouble is – without conversational intelligence – businesses can’t measure FCR accurately.
Sure, they could send out a post-contact survey, but what if the customer hasn’t yet realized that the solution the agent presented won’t work? And, if they have, they still may not complete your survey.