Advances in contact centre technology have transformed the work of the customer service agent forever, inspiring an evolution from a reactive responder role to an engaged facilitator of the brand relationship and customer experience. To explore how this shift will continue to evolve as we enter the 2020s, we caught up with Ross Daniels, Strategic Partnerships VP at Calabrio, for his take on the growing role of workforce optimisation as part of the contact centre product.
“Our product aims to give agents a bit of empowerment, control in their day,” he said.
“When you have a happy agent, you have a happy customer — and that means quality interactions”
The agent is part of a system involving multiple moving parts, and the Calabrio One agent engagement and workforce optimisation suite includes call recording and quality management, forecasting and scheduling tools, and predictive sentiment analysis — leading to continual learning and improvement, just as the tool continues to improve:
“The last piece we added to the suite is a business intelligence reporting tool connected to multiple data sources, for a deeper level of understanding of what’s going on the contact centre or other departments. A lot of times things surface in customer service which are actually a problem in supply chain or marketing or somewhere else”, Daniels explained.
Data unleashed
The theme of interconnectedness of data and removal of silos for optimised performance underpins a trend Daniels highlighted for the customer experience trend of 2020, as we move towards true omni-channel interactions. Reflecting the way customers communicate in real life, to bridge the gaps within the conversation, this functionality is starting to be applied by brands leading the way in customer experience.
Daniels shares a story of contacting his motor insurance company shortly before our conversation, which demonstrates how things are coming together:
“I started in the mobile app to research information, then authenticated some things in the IVR, and finally spoke to an agent — who knew I had been in the app, been in the IVR, and knew exactly what I needed to do: she clearly had every element of that interaction on her screen. It’s very rare… An agent who is moving between emails and texts and social media and voice calls. The service levels on each of those channels are very different. Being able to forecast that schedule is something that will continue to be a real focus for customer for our customer contact centres”.
Intelligence now
The second trend he predicts is an explosion of data for analytics, making better use of information in real-time:
“When I log in for the day, whether I’m a supervisor or an agent or contact centre manager, my screen in Calabrio shows me the top five things I need to take care of right away, or that I need to be concerned about”
“We’re continuing to build toward that vision and analytics plays a big part of that — we analyse the calls from the last four hours or from the last day whatever it is in the last hour.”
So, the future for workforce optimisation is clearly convergent with great customer service, and it’s going to be immediate, intelligent, and individualised.
That’s a win-win-win for a new decade.
