After a tricky couple of years, now is the time for businesses to – first and foremost – commend their customer service superheroes.
Yet, National Customer Service Week is also an excellent time to reflect. What has the contact centre team done to maximize customer, employee, and business outcomes?
Operations must learn from the good – alongside the bad and the ugly.
Of course, it is difficult to confront the latter. However, revaluation leads to vital lessons.
In this spirit, here are five critical areas for contact centres to rethink. Doing so may deliver much more seamless and compelling service experiences.
Reconsider Agent Support Systems
Happy, engaged agents are the cornerstone of customer service success. However, handling emotive, complex contacts - day-in and day-out - is tricky, and the unfortunate reality is that the challenge grows greater all the time.
RingCentral’s most recent research, the 2022 agent experience trends report, paints such a disheartening picture while isolating three particularly troubling trends.
The first is increasing agent workloads. Gartner research backs this up, highlighting a general incline in contact volumes throughout the industry. Meanwhile, an SQM Group study also reveals that average handling time has increased from 545 to 589 seconds since 2019 – across all sectors.
Other causes for concern include widespread agent difficulties with contact centre software and an overall lack of managerial support.
In light of this research, Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst at COMMfusion, said:
“Don't go back to the old way of doing things once the pandemic is over… Make sure you take care of your agents and give them the tools they need to not only be effective and productive but also engaged and empowered.”
Of course, this is critical. However, an agent experience audit is perhaps the best first step. Engage with agents, find out the extent of these issues, and identify others unique to the operation before taking more targeted action.
Re-Examine the Digital Channel Mix
As messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Messenger, come to the fore – alongside new social media platforms and, for some, the metaverse - re-examining the digital channel mix is crucial to keep up with competitors.
However, implementing a new channel is not always the CX win many contact centres anticipate. It often increases demand, opening the business up to a new customer demographic and increasing strain on the contact centre.
Of course, this is excellent for customer engagement, and with savvy channel implementation, the chance also exists to enhance business results and agent experiences.
Yet, contact centres must have the necessary flex to facilitate new channel deployments.
Louise Newbury-Smith, UK Country Manager at RingCentral, also notes several other critical considerations for considering a new channel:
“Consider: what are our goals for the new channel? How will customers access the channel? Can we add voice to simplify channel shift? Can we see if the customer viewed the last interaction? How will we store records of the conversation? And the list goes on.”
Contact centres can enhance their chances of success in their channel implementations by evaluating these considerations with the guidance of a vendor with expert consultation services.
Reexplore the Potential of Conversational AI
Conversational AI is a fast-growing field. Gartner predicts that bots will automate six times more customer conversations in 2026 than it does today.
However, it is not a market without its faults. The analyst also reveals that deployment complexity and a fragmented vendor landscape remain thorns in its side.
Recognizing these, many customer service teams have remained coy, avoiding the lure of the technology and opting to prioritize human-to-human interaction.