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Customer self-service is the secret to surviving this year’s holiday shopping season

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By Smart Tribune

E-commerce retailers must offer exceptional customer service experiences to succeed in what’s likely to be the biggest online holiday shopping season ever.

There is no question that 2020 has been a year of unexpected twists and turns. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has turned everything we know about typical consumer habits on its head. But it has also proven just how powerful the e-commerce ecosystem is for keeping the economy humming in spite of all the headwinds that businesses have faced this year.

As we head into the holidays, with fears mounting around COVID-19’s anticipated “second wave,” it’s clear that the upcoming shopping season will be quite different from any in recent memory. In fact, Deloitte anticipates e-commerce holiday retail to grow between 25% to 35% from November 2020 through January 2021. This means one thing: online retailers must be prepared to anticipate a sharp increase in demand. Customer self-service is the best way to ensure that no shopping cart gets abandoned this holiday season.

For both online and brick-and-mortar retailers, the holiday shopping season is one of the most important times of the year. The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, for better or worse, has added even more pressure for retailers to succeed this year—especially knowing that brick-and-mortar retail sales this year, in the U.S. alone, are predicted to drop by 14%.

This has raised the stakes significantly for online retail to make up for these losses and has changed how both retailers and consumers are approaching the upcoming holiday shopping season. Based on the latest trends data from the National Retail Federation, 74% of retailers believe that consumers will spread out their holiday shopping across several months, making this a longer shopping season than we’ve seen in years past. A study conducted by Radial suggests that 39% of shoppers will begin their holiday shopping as early as October while only 30% will wait until the more traditional Black Friday-Cyber Monday shopping weekend… Continue reading

How to stay focused when working remotely

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By Jabra

Working remotely or flexibly requires consistent self-motivation to remain focused, maintain productivity and successfully work through our daily or weekly task list.

However, we know that focus and productivity can dip at certain times during working hours, so how can we stop our minds wandering, control our focus and remain productive wherever we work?

Jabra spoke to productivity expert Chris Bailey, for his advice – Click here to read more (PDF): DOWNLOAD

Fast, accurate analytics vital as call centres adapt to ‘new normal’ of WFH

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The immediate provision of accurate speech analytics is becoming increasingly vital as contact centres increasingly look to maintain WFH operational models.

That’s the view of leading call centre solution provider Avoira which is anticipating heightened interest in the technology from delegates attending the virtual Contact Centre and Customer Services Summit on the 16th November.

The company reports managers are finding that the interactive nature of a sophisticated real-time analytics solution not only enables more effective call outcomes but enhances employee engagement.

Speaking ahead of the Summit, Steve Watts, Avoira’s head of sales, said: “With team leaders and managers having lost the Captain’s Chair view of what’s happening minute-to-minute,  real-time analytics are even more important and compelling.

“As a result, contact centre directors and heads of innovation are now taking a closer look at the sophisticated tools they might deploy to ensure productivity and service standards are maintained as the novelty of homeworking wears off.”

He adds that capturing real-time traffic not just within a centralised centre but across a remote working network, remains a challenge for all but the most potent speech analytic solutions.

The cloud-based Xdroid solution arguably unique – in delivering real-time analytics of both voice and text communications. It automatically records and analyses all calls and monitors customer experience, compliance and the performance of individual agents, wherever they are working.

The powerful solution can detect and range of emotions, reporting on whether customers are displaying displeasure, uncertainty, disappointment or happiness. Based on analysis of dialogue, it provides on-screen prompts which can steer an agent to engage in specific actions – such as up-selling or making a compensatory gesture – at the time most likely to yield a positive response.

A formidable customer service tool, the technology claims to deliver an increased client retention rate of 30% and an inbound sales uplift of 14%.

It can also increase agent retention and reduce breaches which can result in legal or regulatory actions.

“It’s not just regulatory and legal compliance with which our solution can assist, but in ensuring employees, wherever they are, continue to subscribe to and share the organisation’s ethos,” says Watts. “By providing tools with which to help an agents job be performed more easily and effectively, it also helps them feel valued.”

5 ways to grow your SMS subscriber list

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By mGage

Launching your first SMS campaign is exciting! In order to get started, you will need to build a list of SMS subscribers who have opted-in to being contacted by you. Fortunately, there is plenty of opportunity. More than 5.19 billion people now use mobile phones, up by 124 million over the past year[1]. Read on for 5 ways to grow your SMS subscriber list and start seeing results!

  1. Leverage Existing Followers and Subscribers

Email subscribers and social media followers have already shown interest in getting updates and offers from your brand, so they are a great place to start when building your SMS subscriber list. Be sure to mention the additional value they will get by opting-in to SMS, like exclusive deals and timely updates.

  1. Add to Website Forms, Pop-Ups, and Footers

Providing a way for people to opt-in to receiving messages from you via SMS should become part of your regular website workflows. Add a field for phone number and an opt-in checkbox to all website forms. You can also add a keyword and short code to your website footers and even create a pop-up. Make sure CTAs are clearly visible and easy to find. This way, anyone visiting your site will also have the opportunity to receive SMS messages from you.

  1. Run Digital Advertisements

Advertising online through LinkedIn, Twitter, banner ads and other platforms expands your reach beyond those who are already aware of your brand. One huge advantage of digital advertising is targeting, which enables you to show ads to a very specific audience. You can tailor ads to specific demographics, like age, location, and even interests. This enables you to share offers that feel more personal. For example, if you’re running a promotion to get more women aged 25-35 to opt-in to your SMS campaign, you can feature products or offers that might appeal to that group alongside an exclusive offer they can redeem via text.

  1. Don’t Forget Traditional Media

Signs and mailers may seem old-school, but they are a good way to stand out and reach an additional audience that may be less active online. In fact, 42.2% of direct mail recipients open the mail they get[2]. Many brands promote their SMS list by using in-store signage or even product packaging, which are effective strategies to engage with people who already have purchase intent.

  1. Have a Contest

Contests are a fun way to get customers engaging with your brand while simultaneously encouraging them to opt-in to your SMS subscriber list. Offering the chance to win a reward in exchange for subscribing is incredibly effective. We recommend making the contest unique enough to catch their attention.

We hope these suggestions are helpful as you begin working on building your SMS subscriber list. If you’re ready to get started, get in-touch today with mGage.

[1] https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-global-digital-overview

[2] https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/direct-mail-statistics/#gref

The benefits of homeworking agents and flexible contact centres

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By Jabra

This year has caused a massive shift in where and how we all work, as a direct response to the worldwide disruption caused by the pandemic.

Contact Centres were forced to move their staff to a homeworking model and try to successfully manage agent teams remotely, whilst customer needs grew and became more complex. All of this led to a number of fundamental changes in the working practices and technology stack utilised within contact centres, that required rapid and efficient adoption and deployment.

However, as organisations now start to review their ‘new normal’ business procedures and requirements for the future, Jabra look at the benefits of having homeworking agents and how to manage them.

Click here to read the full article.

Why 2020 will mark the death of the chatbot (as you know it)

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Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO at Content Guru, explains how the convergence of written and verbal chatbot functionality will bring about an entirely new Conversational User Interface (CUI)…

It’s no secret that 2020 has been an unusual year for customer communication. With international lockdowns limiting person-to-person interactions, many companies have turned to digital channels to continue relationships with their customers. Automation, and the trusty chatbot, have proved invaluable to many companies attempting to field the vast amount of customer queries caused by pandemic-induced uncertainty.

However, increased social isolation has put a premium on human interactions. Businesses that can deliver a joined-up customer journey, where the speed and convenience of automated customer service meets on-demand agent attention, will find themselves profiting from increased customer loyalty in the coming recession

Chatbots are dead. Long live chatbots

Most of us have had the misfortune of interacting with a badly configured chatbot. Whether to return faulty clothes or complain about an incorrect phone bill, we are often left feeling even more frustrated than we were beforehand.

Many businesses viewed these chatbots as a cheap panacea to all customer service problems but, in reality, this idea never came to fruition. In the last year or so, businesses should have realised that the idea of the chatbot as a magical one-size-fits-all solution, is dead.

So, the notion of the all-providing IM chatbot that was once hailed as the answer to all our customer service automation needs, is dead. However, the technology is not gone for good. In fact, the chatbot we will soon come to know is just being born.

The very fabric of the chatbot is evolving alongside the advancements in cloud, AI, and voice technologies to become a valuable part of every wider omni-channel portfolio. The convergence of written and spoken chatbot functionalities should, and likely will, be the driving force behind the rebirth of a new CUI, built on the foundations the humble chatbot began.

The resurgence of voice 

According to recent research, only 9 percent of customers felt that they would be best served by a chatbot for serious enquiries, whereas the figures for a voice call were in excess of 80 percent. But with 80 percent of contact centers wanting to adopt chatbot technology by 2020, what is does this industry know that we don’t?

Well, they are seeing the bright and not-so-distant future of this technology, and it doesn’t look like a thing like your average chatbot. The resurgence of voice-led interactions, driven by home assistants such as Alexa, and the fact that customers still overwhelmingly prefer to speak to another human for important queries, is ushering in a new Golden Age of Voice. This has led to a growing maturity in the consumer base that sees the chatbot becoming a valuable channel led by the latest, cutting-edge voice technology.

A branch of AI called Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the most recent developments that is pushing the chatbot to become more than it once was. With 2020 set to be the year that Natural Language Processing (NLP) goes mainstream in contact centres, the new CUI chatbot will benefit from the rich insights produced by this tool.

A necessary evolution

The chatbot has often been defined as just an online text-based engagement portal, but with NLP cementing itself in the last year or so as a tool that opens up unprecedented insight into voice data, especially in customer journey analytics, the chatbot should be the next to follow suit.

Yesterday’s humble V1.0 chatbot will evolve alongside these technological advancements in voice. By building on the chatbot in this way, it stops becoming a one-stop-shop of automated responses, and instead becomes the shop-front to an intelligent customer engagement hub.

In practice this simply means that those customers with more complex enquiries can be transferred to a human agent, and those with simple queries can save time by utilising the CUI alone. All using an automated CUI powered by NLP and sentiment tracking.

Sentiment is king

With NLP, by the time the agent answers a customer they know exactly what their issue is, since the call has already been categorised. Queries can be resolved faster and more accurately, since the agent is more prepared and won’t have to spend time searching for answers in real-time during the call.

There is now a big rush to roll out NLP everywhere, in all sectors. It is set to be a gamechanger in the contact centre industry, since it is manifestly more efficient than a traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and supports agent activity.

Advancements in sentiment analysis will be the next big step for NLP and will continue to pave the way for monumental changes to the chatbot in 2020. This is where a sophisticated mix of keywords, tone of voice, and volume create a much deeper picture of the caller and their needs for the agent. With this information, businesses can ensure that each caller is routed to the agent or department best equipped to deal with their enquiry.

For example, if sentiment analysis during a chatbot interaction detects a customer who is distressed, the call can be routed to an agent who is experienced or trained in handling these types of conversation. This streamlines processes and ensures customers are always served by the most suitable person.

The chatbot in 2020 and beyond

So, while the chatbot as we know it is not destined to take over the world of contact centers, the future of the chatbot is far from doomed. Instead, 2020 is an exciting time for the latest evolution of this cog in the wider machine of all successful customer engagement hubs.

These changes will ultimately lay the foundations for a future where, as a consumer, it will be extremely difficult — if not impossible — to tell the difference between human and chatbot. Advances in sentiment tracking, NLP and machine learning will all drive the chatbot to become the ultimate customer service assistant.

Revolutionise your contact centre with next generation chatbot functionality: https://bit.ly/2GcY06v

Tell us about your contact centre systems; are they disparate or seamlessly integrated? 

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By Seth Millis, Aspect

By some estimates, 91% of IT staff time is spent on software maintenance. This doesn’t leave very much time for innovation. Over time, systems that (at the time) would never need to communicate, suddenly find themselves reliant upon each other. While originally specialisation and customisation may have driven software architecture, integration is rapidly becoming the primary feature of any system worthwhile.

Systems designed to communicate effectively with each other seamlessly are easy to use, cut training time, and typically lead your company down the scalability path; but they come at a cost. Disparate systems are highly specialised and are created around the needs of the organization, not the other way around. Often proprietary, these innovative databases help you achieve specific goals that no other company can achieve. Regardless of your choice of system, there are a couple of considerations no matter what architecture you prefer.

System Upgrades – All systems require scheduled maintenance, costly upgrades, emergency triage, constant training, and a staff with highly specialised knowledge. 

Third Party Compatibility – Good partnerships require compromise and a little bit of conformity. Connecting with new teams, consultants, and partners efficiently means that eventually, your systems will have to interface with theirs.

Management – Whether managing a plethora of systems of just a few (nobody manages just one!) You need the right people and the right budget. Keeping multiple systems running requires patience, knowledge, logistics, vision, and a little luck.

Ultimately, whether using disparate or integrated systems, what really matters is how your data is handled. Your choice of system doesn’t really matter if you can’t perform data exchanges, automation, workflows, while ensuring access and security.

What systems or services do you have in place to access your data remotely?

Even before 2020 centres were making the transition from on-premise software to cloud communication systems. The immediate advantages of remote access right now are obvious. But what systems do you have in place to access your data remotely? What services and features are helping your company function as efficiently as possible?

Cloud Subscription – It’s never been clearer that a system should facilitate a company’s data needs in real time. Unplanned or emergency updates are disruptive and potentially disastrous. But a well-designed system provides your business with greater flexibility and agility, meaning deployments can be completed in a much shorter timeframe, at non-peak hours, and with less staff.

Streamlined User Experience – Customisation is what makes your agents, team leads, and administrators stand out.  Remote solutions should tailor access experience to display the information employees need at the right time through custom widgets and dashboards, and by focusing on the needs of the business and moving unnecessary features to the background.

High Availability – A highly dependable remote platform is the most important of your business needs. When you need the ability to access data quickly to changing demand, that makes your business tremendously agile and competitive. You simply cannot compromise when it comes to ensuring uptime and functionality.

Omnichannel Integration – One of the greatest benefits of the cloud is that it facilitates omnichannel service integration. More than ever, channels and data need to be available according to customer preferences. You’ve got to be able to meet your customers where they want. A system must deliver cohesive self-service and agent-assisted data across all channels, including voice, text, social and mobile Web apps. Organisations that provide a consistent and seamless cross-channel experience when customers engage, inquire and request service are poised and prepared to cover all their bases.

How do you approach disaster and business continuity planning, and how do you ensure that contact centre staff can access the technology they need to maintain critical operations in the event of a disaster or outage?

Contact centres around the world are on the front-line of servicing their customers and addressing their concerns at this unprecedented time. Organisations are faced with unforeseen challenges and interacting with customers has never been more important. When designing disaster recovery and business continuity plans, it’s also important to consider the impact of lesser events such as power or internet outages.

The first step of preparing the contact centre for a disaster or outage is to ensure that its technology can be accessed in these circumstances.

Holding regular training sessions with agents to prepare for an outage helps organizations transition to working remotely more easily. Agents need to be familiar with how to access and download software, connect to an environment or VPNs, and what changes in procedures to expect. Staff should also be aware of any resources to help assist them transition, such as how-to guides and training videos.

In the event of an outage or disaster, adjustments to escalation rules may be necessary. If there is a surge in demand for front-level supervisors and managers that cannot be accommodated, it may make sense to create a dedicated escalation queue. This will allow management to continue to focus on their core responsibilities when they are needed most.

The best advice when thinking about an emergency preparedness strategy is to Be Proactive. One of the most effective ways to reduce surge, volume, anxiety, and to minimise mistakes is to anticipate the needs of customers and proactively communicate with them by sending guidance, notifications, or instructions on how to use self-service through their channels of choice.

It’s also important to remember purpose. During an outage remaining proactive also means that companies should strive to preserve critical contact centre functionality in order to:

  • Maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • Retain at-risk customers and prevent negative customer experiences
  • Support customers when they need it most
  • Maintain revenue sources, which may be even more critical during a disaster
  • Continue accounts receivables / cash collections flow

Having an end-to-end disaster triage, recovery, and continuity strategy to communicate and implement is critically essential for companies as we continue to navigate collections in 2020 and beyond.

How important is security to your organisation?

A solid foundation for a secure, private, and scalable cloud environment is always good systems architecture. This enables shared services to support multiple customers simultaneously across regions and around the world. Your security solution must also centralise control, enabling you to simply and easily manage on-site staff you have, as well as off-site agents at the highest level of security.

As we’ve seen, the shift to remote work requires additional considerations and planning. In the event of emergencies, temporarily establishing additional security protocols and creating rules about what information can be printed are necessary to keep sensitive information safe. This helps organisations keep sensitive information including customer Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data secure at a time of heightened sensitivity and scrutiny. Organisational security means safeguarding your business, your data, your customers’ data, and your employees.

Do your policies and procedures reflect this distinction? Blanket policies may offer a general guideline, but as we’ve seen in 2020, very specific and unforeseen circumstances can and will arise. Are your policies and security rules designed accordingly? Do your written policies and procedures match your systems and security rules?

How does a potential shift to cloud change your expectations regarding your access to your data? How does this impact your future plans regarding management of your data?

In the last 6 months digitisation and cloud-based access has taken centre stage. The volume of data and immediate need for remote access forced even the most traditional collections call centres to rethink and revamp their strategies.

While the unexpected and inevitable downtime and latency many businesses experienced forced a temporary reliance on inbound marketing and proactive customer channels; it also forced the rapid deployment of cloud-based data transactions —such as robocalls, SMS, messaging apps, email, social media, and portals. These cloud-managed channels were designed to be minimally invasive and cohesive in messaging—ideal for the unforeseen time/work/life shift that is currently underway.

Because these strategies require minimal administrative overhead and can be managed in the cloud, data disruptions went largely unnoticed for the businesses who were already tracking the shift. For the companies unprepared or ill equipped to handle this major shift in dynamic, however, the results were catastrophic. Collections call centres and companies that were able to retrieve and maintain data quickly have recently reported major reductions in the number of accounts that require escalation or attention.

Proactive cloud data management can also be a gateway to improve customer experience. This deeper, more customised experience in turn, can lead to better call centre collection rates by maintaining a consistent message and driving interaction for customers.  Ensuring seamless consistency in messaging and support for high-value customers is the lynchpin of a successful growth strategy.

When your operations require shifting to the cloud, nothing should be compromised. Aspect has proactive solutions powerful enough to remain versatile and deliver your data when you need it.

Ready to learn more? Contact us to schedule a demo and talk about your needs.

WEBINAR: 3-Step Guide to Scaling your Business using AI

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Deploying AI in Contact Centres for rapid on-boarding of new business

By Jim Nolan, Sales Manager, KantanMT

One of the most significant challenges, faced by the contact centres industry is on-boarding new territories and customers. Many contact centre managers will way say it takes too long, it’s expensive, and complex. And if the on-boarding process includes a multi-lingual dimension, then hiring agents with product expertise coupled with language skills can be a nightmare. Combined with increased costs associated with multilingual agent resourcing and rostering, it’s no wonder contact centre managers view it as a significant challenge in scaling their business!

Many contact centre managers are looking towards AI as a solution to help them rapidly scale their business and on-board new clients. This is especially prevalent in the context of providing multi-lingual support and services. These progressive contact centres are shifting the hiring focus away from languages with an emphasis on agent product/service knowledge and expertise.

However, to do this successfully, they must remove the language barrier from all aspects of their service chain, ensuring that any agent, can service any ticket in any language!

By removing the language barrier, contact centres fundamentally change how they organise and deploy support teams. While traditional contact centres establish regional and/or language teams, todays progressive centres focus on product/service teams, where language is simply irrelevant.

To achieve this, progressive contact centres are looking towards AI to remove the language barrier and accelerate on-boarding. This results in higher agent productivity, happier clients, and enhanced business agility.

KantanSkynet is an AI platform that fuses the latest neural machine translation technologies, with a community of professional editors, removing the language barrier and helping contact centres scale.

Jim Nolan, AI Evangelist, will present a 3-Step Guide to how AI is used by 1,500 agents at Keywords Studios, for the Gaming and Entertainment industry, delivering support in 12 European and Asian languages. The presentation will explore how KantanSkynet is used to remove the language barrier, shifting the hiring focus away from language skills and driving the rapid on-boarding of new territories and clients.

Join us on Wednesday 16th September for our webinar and gain an insight into scaling your business using AI.

Click here to reserve you seat at the webinar.

If you require additional information, please contact  Jimn@kantanmt.com.

Meet with Diabolocom at the Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit!

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There’s only a few weeks left until the Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit!

Let’s take advantage of this virtual event to enhance your customer interactions!

Diabolocom‘s 100% cloud software can be integrated to your CRM in only a few minutes.

Self-service, personalized messages, post-call workflows, …

Are you ready to set up the best strategies in order to increase sales while improving customer satisfaction?

Free Demo Here https://www.diabolocom.com/en/free-demo

Call Centre Management – Getting it right from the start

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By Simon Black, CEO, Awaken Intelligence

We all know how having a great contact centre manager can make the world of difference to managing your team of agents and delivering outstanding campaigns. However, with the news that Oracle, alone, sent more than 100,000 customer service agents home to work, how can you ensure that you’re still delivering the best call centre management even with the majority of your agents working remotely?

As a recent FT article highlighted, “the image of a seamless, 24-hour global work ethic (from the contact centre industry), relies to a great extent on humans in large offices – ‘butts on seats’, as one industry locution has it.”

Covid-19 is dramatically changing the contact centre landscape as we know it. So, what critical disciplines and tools are the very foundation of great management of your business? And how can you evolve to ensure you’re getting the best performance and customer satisfaction possible, wherever you can? Below you’ll find a few gems that will support your agents in this rapidly evolving sector.

Onboarding and Culture

According to Glassdoor organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70% yet a study by Gallup found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job of onboarding new employees! The challenge to introduce new joiners effectively is greater than ever and while we know that the job market is going to be flooded at a time like this it is important you get it right. Finding self-motivated individuals that fit within your contact centre and that aren’t just ‘butts on seats’ is really important. You may be looking for completely different people compared to your traditional hires. You’re going to need self-starters that are motivated and that aren’t afraid to shout as they settle into their new role. Managing the existing team is hard enough at the moment but you need to ensure your new agents aren’t just thrown in the deep-end! Make sure you have a robust onboarding process where they get the following:

  • To meet their team and key managers in the business. Give them a feel for your company culture even if it’s only via video calls.
  • Make sure you cover all the HR aspects and get the admin out of the way as quickly as possible.
  • Ease them into the role by showing them the systems and procedures by using video training. The technology exists to do this so there’s really no excuse!
  • Appoint a mentor – a key person your new hire can go to when they’re feeling anxious or have any questions as they settle into the role, and encourage them to schedule regular, virtual coffee meetings. According to HCI, 87% of organisations that assign an ambassador or buddy program during the onboarding process say that it’s an effective way to speed up new hire proficiency.

You’ll see we also mentioned company culture. We know it’s difficult to keep this going while everyone is working remotely but it’s vital as BreatheHR’s Culture Economy Report 2020 highlighted, estimating that toxic workplaces cost the UK economy £15.7 bn every year. Encouraging existing employees as well as new agents to contribute to conversations, turn up on team calls and join in online quizzes or cocktail hours will help to keep people motivated even in this disjointed world.

Best Tools for the Job

AI and voice analytics are changing the way in which many businesses operate and contact centres are no different. Our conversational analytics will not only help you to analyse the vocabulary and sentiment in your most established performers but will also help you to pick up on where new starters are struggling too.  This is so important when you’re unable to stroll around your call centre and listen into conversations taking place. Plus, it’s actually a far more practical and informative way of keeping your finger on the pulse.

Not only will scripting and analytics help to guide even the newest recruits through their first calls but, also with this informative data they’ll soon be able to understand what makes a seamless journey for the customer and a better day at work for them! Here’s a reminder of why conversational analytics (CA) is so important for your agents:

  • The intuitive way CA works means your agents require less training or can move on to different campaigns without spending hours reading reams of training manuals.
  • Ability to handle calls and resolve them faster than before, which means your agent’s experience and job satisfaction will be higher and your cost per call is kept in control.
  • Your agents have the ability to focus on the conversation, rather than the process which means both agent and customer have a better experience. That means your staff retention improves dramatically.
  • By providing you with actionable insights formed into one report, it will allow you to motivate your agents in the right directions and stimulate continuous improvement.

Automate

Automating the intensive process of monitoring agent-customer interactions at scale can help to highlight which agents might need further training and on what in particular. Also, there are repetitive call centre tasks such as listening to agents calls and manually evaluating agent’s performance or screening the calls for quality assurance (QA), that can be automated to make the role more enjoyable. Given automation is a proven way to reduce attrition investing in automation makes even more sense when you look at the numbers. According to Response Design Corporation call centres replace approximately 26% of their agents each year and a report from CIPD claims that the average cost for replacing call centre staff is £6,125. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to realise that re-hiring and training 26% of your workforce on an annual basis is pretty expensive! So, doing anything to retain the great performers is more than worthwhile.

Metrics

It sounds simple but measurements should be in place to monitor individual, team and campaign performance. How can you reward and praise if you have nothing to benchmark people’s efforts by? And similarly, how can you report success on a particular campaign if there are no KPIs.

Any decent call centre technology will provide you with a reporting dashboard where you can gather critical data at every level. You need to measure from the individual call, agent, team, campaign and across the entire contact centre. Generating these reports shouldn’t mean that your contact centre manager spends hours stuck in Excel, these should be generated by a powerful web-based tool providing managers with all necessary information to make strategical decisions for your contact centre.

The Customer is Always King

You’ve heard it before, but your agents should never forget that delivering frictionless customer experience is critical to your organisation’s success. Help them to really understand what makes your customers tick, the variety of different requirements and to share experiences with their peers to help better the experience for all. It’s also important to remind your team, no matter how difficult the client interaction is, that being polite and positive will pay dividends. Smiling on a camera during your virtual meetings will make the conversation instantly warmer in 9 out of 10 cases. And sometimes we all have to accept that if people have a bad day and not to take it too personally either.

Going Full Circle Time and Again

While it’s been tricky with agents working remotely during this time finding ways to offer feedback and being accessible to your team is key to maintaining morale and motivation. We’ve discussed the importance several times of being a good listener and how to run a team efficiently to encourage two-way conversations across the team so they can support one another and share learnings.

As we’ve already said it takes a certain type of person to work in a contact centre and an incredibly motivated one to work from home on their own, amongst a virtual team. That is not going to change any time soon. They need to be confident, efficient and a good listener as well as a team player. However, to help them be successful you need to deploy the right tools and pay attention to the data you garner to ensure that your managers, your agents and campaigns run as efficiently as possible.

Covid-19 has been a catalyst for digital transformation this year, pushing businesses from all industries to embrace smarter technology to support their people and allow their operations to thrive. Solutions that you once viewed as a ‘nice to have’ or planned to introduce over the next five years are now a necessity. Equipping your team with the best will not only enhance their working lives but dramatically improve your customer experience (CX) too.