Microsoft has released a report highlighting systemic problems in UK contact centers.
Its conclusion? "For many consumers, and indeed contact center staff, the service experience is broken."
While some may disagree, UK customer service teams are under more pressure than ever.
Indeed, Microsoft’s "Modernising UK Contact Centres with the Cloud and AI" study reveals that 87 percent of staff agree that the volume of service queries they handle has increased.
Moreover, 56 percent of contact center agents reportedly feel close to burnout.
Meanwhile, long queues have become an unfortunate reality. Citing a previous study, Microsoft noted that wait times range from an average of two minutes in telecommunications to 35 minutes across the energy sector.
To put the latter into more context, that’s like listening to Bohemian Rhapsody 14 times.
Citing these results, the report summarized:
Customers encounter disjointed and frustrating experiences while languishing on the receiving end of long holds, multiple transfers, and unsatisfactory resolutions.
“[Meanwhile,] agents struggle with limited views of customer information, repetitive manual tasks, and juggling multiple outdated apps and tools.”
Microsoft advocates switching to a cloud contact center platform to address some of these issues.
In doing so, the enterprise tech giant noted how “only 11 percent of European contact centers have fully embraced cloud solutions.”
Yet, while the cloud can go a long way in integrating key systems, streamlining agent experiences, and enabling contact centers to deploy various AI innovations, it’s not without its challenges.
For instance, regulatory hurdles, difficult migration workloads, and budget limitations often slow down contact center migration projects.
As a result, years into their deployments, many businesses get stuck in an uncomfortable hybrid model, paying more for the cloud but unable to access its full potential.
Therefore, it’s understandable that 89 percent of contact centers are yet to fully embrace the technology.
However, as customer experience, staff burnout, and technology fragmentation issues put contact centers under more pressure, a cloud model – with embedded AI – will become increasingly appealing.