Using the right contact center technology
The right technology can turn a cost into an investment. Yet, as an organization grows, there’s every chance the number of applications and systems agents need to use to do their job will also increase.
The efficient application and use of technology are fundamental to efficient contact center operations, but if agents have to constantly toggle between tabs, windows or systems in the course of customer interactions, average handle times are going to increase, availability will decrease and queuing times and abandonment rates will also start climbing.
Unified agent desktop
If all channels and information aren’t presented together, it’s difficult for agents to see the big picture or focus on the conversation and its intricacies. Without direct access to a full customer history, it becomes harder for agents to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell and could even make them slower to react to potential attempts at social engineering or other fraudulent behavior.
A unified desktop presents all pertinent details and necessary applications in one place to eliminate these types of distractions and reduce agent frustration. Without a unified view, it’s impossible to attempt to deliver omnichannel CX or successfully integrate new processes or features aimed at improving agent performance.
A unified desktop view for agents better enables the delivery of omnichannel CX.
Automation
Even with a unified view, there’s still a host of repetitive and time-consuming tasks an agent will need to undertake throughout a shift. For instance, because agents need to update files and input information during and following each conversation, there are many times when agents are not interacting with a customer yet are unable to take a call. And, of course, this will negatively impact an organization’s ability to lower AHT, improve FCR or reduce the average time customers spend in queues or on hold.
Speech and text analytics will make it possible to automatically generate and input post-call summaries. This ensures customer histories are always up to date, accurate and consistent and agents are no longer under pressure to manually key in the relevant information. This same capability can also reduce the average time of interactions between agents and customers as forms are auto-populated based on customer responses and information is automatically retrieved from knowledge bases or other systems and presented to the agent. This frees agents to focus on the conversation and building rapport rather than toggling between applications or databases.
Assistance
Through leveraging the full capabilities of customer experience analytics beyond speech and text recognition, processing and analysis, it’s also possible to automate agent assistance.
By constantly processing every interaction between customers and agents, these technologies can act immediately based on the context and content of a conversation. In practice, this means agents can receive on-screen alerts or prompts regarding the next-best action or whether the interaction presents an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell. Equally, an agent can be warned that due to tone of voice or choice of vocabulary, the customer may be on the verge of ending their relationship with a brand.
Assurance
Manually monitoring and analyzing live contacts for quality or gaps in agent training will never tell the whole story regarding contact center performance.
But with the same technology and tools that enable speech and text analytics to automate after-call work and agent coaching, an organization can score agents for every aspect of performance, from compliance and adherence to scripts, gaps in training or even the most common contact drivers that should be directed towards automated or self-service channels. Automating quality assurance eliminates the risk of human error or unconscious bias. It also provides a big-picture view of agent performance over time rather than as a random snapshot.
A deep level of automated insight gives agents everything they need to do their job with confidence and to focus on achieving a positive emotional resolution.
