Hybrid working is in the news almost every day. Some of the biggest employers in the world have already announced permanent “work anywhere” strategies. Now research reveals that only 6.93% of contact centre leaders plan on bringing most of their staff back to the office.
This trend holds significant importance when customer experience agents are concerned. With buyers becoming increasingly selective in how, where and when they spend money over the course of the pandemic, delivering strong CX (customer experience) is crucial to winning and keeping customers.
Last year, the industry analyst Gartner predicted that customer experience would become the key differentiator for consumer and business buyers – and this prophecy has come true.
Businesses that had not invested in new CX tech at the start of last year found themselves in a dire situation, with frustrated customers not being able to get through, and contact centre agents themselves feeling demotivated.
From Cost Centre to Value Centre
The more careful nature of consumer spending is coupled with a desire from businesses to get more out
of their current crop of agents. Many organisations are now choosing to invest in their existing employees’ performance, rather than going down the costly route of recruiting new staff, according to Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of contact centre technology provider, Content Guru.
“We are living through a period of uncertainty, and contact centres are looking to keep costs as low as possible while adapting to the evolving digital landscape,” Taylor continues.
“Rather than expanding their workforce, businesses are looking at how to gain more value from existing employees. Just as the pandemic forced them to analyse, and therefore realise, the benefits of improving employee experience, so organisations are looking to invest in technology that assists agents and enables them to work more efficiently, quickly and effectively.
“The focus is now on tech that can enhance employee experience just as much as CX.”
Taylor said that the home working revolution has taken the CX industry out of its comfortable, closely monitored environment. The sector is now in uncharted waters, with workforces dispersed and employees demanding more flexibility in their working lives.
Homeworking and productivity are often viewed as synonymous nowadays. But a study by Harvard Business Review found that contact centre workers who participated in in-person guided meetings saw a 24% increase in sales productivity. For any organisation looking to make a distributed working model permanent, a significant investment must be made to ensure that remote collaboration and communication techniques are properly effective.
Optimisation Leads to Transformation
An integrated, scalable workforce optimisation (WFO) solution is key to managing teams in the new environment. This is particularly true as the UK begins to ease out of lockdown in the coming months, with more employees beginning to return to the office, whilst many others remain at home.
Content Guru’s storm® WFO offering enables contact centres to train, support, monitor and engage with agents, says Taylor, through a clutch of digital tools:
- storm WFMTM – Forecasts incoming interactions, before creating a schedule for agents, or AI-backed Machine AgentsTM, to service demand according to adjustable criteria. WFM determines schedules based on cost-effectiveness and service level adherence, as well as leveraging available data on agent skill sets to ensure every interaction is of high-quality
- storm RECORDERTM – Converged recording of every channel of communication that employees use, including fixed-line and mobile voice, plus social, IM, email and SMS interactions on-screen, enabling continual monitoring for compliance and quality
- storm QMTM – Allows monitoring of interactions and tracking agent performance over time; measured against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and business goals to ensure quality objectives are met and best practice policies established
- storm ANALYTICSTM – Uses AI-backed Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to automatically analyse large volumes of interactions accurately, enabling organisations to mitigate risk, maintain compliance, improve agent performance, and optimise the customer experience
- storm CKS®: Knowledge Management – An integrated Knowledge Management module that guides agents proactively to the right information and responses, ensuring they can deliver a best-in-class customer experience
- storm VIEW™ – Fully integrated, accurate and granular reporting provides visibility over the success rate of calls, enabling organisations to analyse the responsiveness of their workforce, optimising efficiency and performance
- storm UNIVERSITYTM – A cutting-edge e-learning system for training and up-skilling agents, wherever they are based
UC and CX Unite
Taylor adds that, for a CX infrastructure to operate effectively in a hybrid working world, it must integrate with the unified communications solutions that businesses use to collaborate internally.
He explained that Content Guru has developed integrations with Microsoft Teams and Zoom – the two platforms that have emerged as the de facto standards of remote working.
“Businesses must invest in unified communications infrastructure when establishing a distributed hybrid working culture for agents,” Taylor stresses.
“In the age of distributed working, your employees use a range of different digital tools to communicate with one another.
“To keep business running as usual during unprecedented times, and to optimise operations for the long term, it is essential that you align your front- and back-office teams, by providing them with access to their preferred methods of collaboration,” he concludes.
“As we move into what is hopefully the final phases of the pandemic, the future of work is beginning to take shape as a place where CX and EX (employee experience) work together in harmony.”
