LiveVox has released the second edition of its LiveVox Work from Home Report entitled ‘The Remote Tipping Point’ that has found business leaders are shunning remote work to get agents back to their offices.
Overall, this year’s report found that there is a push by management to return to contact centres, but capabilities now found in the cloud and advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence, have shown that a hybrid model can accommodate remote agents and improve contact centre productivity.
LiveVox interviewed over 300 contact centre executives across North America, in more than five industries, to understand the challenges and successes they experienced while working from home. All participants in the survey directly oversaw customer service and contact centre operations for their organisations.
As the title of the report suggests, the contact centre industry has reached a tipping point when it comes to the future of work. While some organisations have decided to remain remote indefinitely others are leaning toward a full return to the contact centre for agents, in spite of demonstrated remote agent performance gains. For example, compared to last year, there was a 50% reduction in the number of contact centre decision makers planning to keep at least a quarter of their workforce remote. All organisations can be aided by the many innovative workforce optimisation and AI solutions, like LiveVox’s AI-enabled chatbots and speech analytics that can enhance productivity, foster a sense of agent community, and also help mitigate security and compliance risks.
LiveVox CEO Louis Summe, said: “The global shutdown showed us that a remote workforce is a viable option for many industries and, in the case of contact centres, can improve the employee experience. However, a 100 percent remote future isn’t a viable option for every organisation.
