Working in a contact centre can be pretty hectic for employees. Often agents find themselves toggling between several windows on their desktop, which can understandably cause productivity issues – this is why having the right information and expertise to hand can help improve workflow on a massive scale.
While discussing the typical issues faced day-to-day by agents with UC Today, Patrick Russell, director of product marketing at 8×8, said that “constant toggling and having to understand different navigation logic from system to system,” is one of the most common obstacles contact centre employees are up against.
Easing agent ‘cognitive load’
Russell also added: “Disparate and legacy systems that aren’t connected to one another place a substantial cognitive load on certain agents, this reduces effectiveness and increases stress.”
“An agent’s success is measured down to the finest detail of everything they do, including tone used with a customer through to how quickly they handle queries”
“To ease a little bit of their effort, we really believe that a unified communication experience, such as 8×8 X Series, is one of the key steps in minimising their work without compromising the outcome for a customer.”
“This type of technology makes it easier for agents to get information, whether that’s communicating with the machine or working with their subject matter experts in-house, talking to their peers, they can do all of this through the same platform they’re using to communicate with their customers. This means it can be so much faster and easier to get answers and resolve the customer’s needs quickly.”
Russell made the comments as the company launched the latest version of its Contact Centre product. The update sees the product becoming available in a standalone capacity as opposed to purely being part of 8×8’s wider UC offering.
Russell said that bringing all communications, from voice to chat to video together into one interface is a big deal and can make such a difference.
Bringing the workforce together
The software also brings video conferencing into the agent interface, this is called 8×8 Video Meetings.
“In a distributed workforce, where there are often employees who work from home – something that is now commonplace in the modern workplace – instead of having the coaching sessions take place exclusively over audio, agents can work with their supervisors in a video conference without having to worry about sending links or having licenses to access different video conferencing apps,” Russell added.
“This provides another way for the management team to interact with their agents on a more one-to-one basis, without having to worry about more licenses, more technology and more toggling and so on”
Russell said that going forward, the company will be looking at providing greater support for agents through automation. Such automation will help agents decide what the next best action is to take during a call or with AI technology providing coaching tips on calls.
“This actually ends up not just decreasing the cognitive load and stress on agents but should also start reducing the training requirements for agents as well. You’re not having to train them on every nut and bolt of whatever the technology and spend more time on business-oriented material,” he added.
