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Working from home: How separation affects the contact center

960 640 Adam Aftergut

By Adam Aftergut, Product Marketing Manager, NICE

Part two in a three-part series on the root causes of work-from-home challenges faced by contact center agents and their employers…

As we noted in the first essay in this series on work-from-home challenges, fundamentally changing boundaries are having an impact on staffing and performance in the contact center. The most obvious and inherent shift is the physical separation between employees and their workplace in remote work models. In the contact center, that separation has created challenges that may seem unrelated upon first blush but are in all actuality two sides of the same coin.

While many employees view working from home as a perk, remote work nonetheless brings with it some operational challenges that weren’t present in the brick-and-mortar workplace. Remote agents often have less visibility into scheduling and performance as well as fewer opportunities for in-person recognition and professional development. These issues, in turn, translate directly into business challenges for their employer, with a direct effect on service levels, customer experience and efficiency.

Overcoming work-from-home challenges for agents also resolves them for the contact center, and vice versa, enabling seamless operation regardless of the distance between them. The following three critical work-from-home challenges are inextricably linked to the physical separation between the employee and their workplace.

Employees need schedule visibility; employers need agents to be reachable.

Many remote workers lack mobile access to their schedules, which leads to tardiness and more missed shifts, lowering adherence and increasing staffing variances. Moreover, the lack of remote agent views of schedule change opportunities (e.g., Extra Hours or Voluntary Time Off) impedes the resolution of intraday staffing variances.

In addition, in the fast-moving contact center, the surroundings and tempo keep employees on task, aware of the general arc of the day and in close touch with supervisors who can intervene or provide a gentle nudge as necessaryThese cues help agents know where they need to be, whether they’re late, what events are upcoming and whether they should move to a new activity, among other things.

How technology can help you solve this challenge:  A scheduling portal for automated self-service in a native mobile app or web-based application allows agents to access and update their schedules while remote. The portal’s intelligent automation technology also enables preapproved schedule change opportunities, giving agents unmatched transparency of their scheduling options and enabling instant changes by agents, all while ensuring that staffing needs are met. Automated push offers of schedule change opportunities also help supervisors ensure staffing optimization for contact center operations.

Employees need personalized recognition; employers need teams that are motivated.

The nature of work-from-home arrangements eliminates informal opportunities to connect with and motivate teams. When workers are remote, it is also harder to quickly recognize top performers and reward effective practices in real time. In fact, a Gallup poll found that three quarters of employees did not receive recognition or praise for doing good work in the last week, leading to lower quality and higher absenteeism.

The motivational challenge for contact centers in remote work environments is two-fold: identifying and rewarding high performers. Personalized and instant recognition of their progress, and rewards for their successes, help agents feel they are on a path toward definite goals. When employees are working on site, supervisors can easily share praise or set up a brief ad-hoc meeting during in-office hours. Agents, for their part, can shadow or receive on-the-fly input from co-workers. Other types of recognition for performance, such as preferential scheduling options, are dependent on being able to inform the agent in a timely manner.

How technology can help you solve this challenge: Automated KPI-based notifications alert supervisors or agents when the team or individual agents have hit key performance goals, such as a daily adherence target. These notifications provide instant recognition for agents and contact center teams when their performance is noteworthy, providing motivation, recognition and reinforcement. In addition, they can move agents through a multi-step progression of goals. By helping supervisors see who is performing well in the moment, they also shed a light into best practices.

Employers need to provide development opportunities; employees need self-improvement options.

In the remote workplace, employees can be harder to coach or train due to the lack of in-person guidance and timely feedback, including indications of the impact of coaching sessions. Supervisors who wish to promote self-directed corrective measures in response to negative KPI trends are faced with the challenge of notifying agents working from home promptly. As a result, performance improvements take longer and occur in less significant increments.

In addition, agents working remotely who wish to manage their own professional self-improvement are often limited in their options to receive the best information on their performance. This may be due to poor remote access or visibility, a dependence on supervisors or a lack of real-time data.

How technology can help you solve this challenge: Agents receive timely, targeted and personalized alerts of KPI trends via native mobile and web-based applications as well as via automated emailing and text messaging, identifying areas for improvement before CSAT takes a hit.  These KPI alerts can also account for correlated KPI trends, such as a spike in average handle time preceding a drop in service levels. Supervisors are also automatically informed of an agent’s metrics – if intervention is needed, the focus of improvement efforts is clear and transparent to both the agent and the supervisor.

Different perspectives, common solutions.

Each of the work-from-home challenges caused by physical separation can be viewed from two perspectives – that of the employer and that of the employee. However, if you solve the challenge for one stakeholder, then you’ve often also solved it for the other.

NICE Employee Engagement Manager (EEM), a key component of the NICE Intelligent WFM Suite, enables contact centers to bridge the gap between remote employee and workplace. The broad capabilities of EEM’s intelligent automation engine not only improve staffing levels intraday and near-term, but also drive a wide variety of employee actions for improved performance.

Learn more about how EEM helps contact center teams adapt to changing boundaries in the work-from-home environment.

The next installment in this series on work-from-home challenges takes a deeper look at another way in which professional boundaries are changing – the blurring of the distinction between work and home.

Do you need help in generating more efficient schedules and automating the challenge of optimizing your net staffing?

Download our complimentary eBook:  Intelligent Automation and Simulation in WFM for Dummies.

This book will help you understand how using machine learning based simulation can help create schedules based on true multi-skill efficiencies based on ACD routing rules and skills not just static percentages. It will also help you see how you can automatically and proactively create offers for voluntary time off and overtime based on skills to the exact right agents, thus solving the age-old issue of net staffing optimization.

The root cause of work-from-home challenges

960 640 Adam Aftergut

By Adam Aftergut, Product Marketing Manager, NICE

Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank) moved more than 9,000 call center employees from 15 cities in the US and Canada to a work-from-home (WFH) model in the weeks following widespread shutdowns due to COVID-19. Company leaders told Bloomberg that the bank, which serves 26 million customers, helped ease the massive transition by giving workers who suddenly found themselves juggling work and new distractions in the home an extra 10 personal days and the ability to change schedules and do split shifts.

Like TD Bank, many organizations found that the overnight transition to employees working from home created new challenges related to staffing (who is working and when) and performance (how they’re working). In the contact center, these challenges can be traced back to a single root cause: changing boundaries.

Fundamentally, boundaries are changing for employees and teams in two key ways: 1) a separation between the employee and their workplace; and 2) a blurring of boundaries in the employee’s workday.

Remote work, by its very nature, is accompanied by a physical distance between the employee and his or her workplace. Many workers view the ability to work remotely as a job perk, with more than half seeking the arrangement as a way to improve work-life balance, according to the American Psychological Association (APA). Moreover, researchers have found that remote work, when done right, can even improve employee productivity, creativity and morale. However, the relative isolation from colleagues makes communication and collaboration more difficult, and can intensify feelings of loneliness, according to an annual survey of remote workers carried out by Buffer and AngelList.

In the contact center, this separation poses several critical WFH productivity challenges:

  • Visibility: Employers need to maintain open lines of communication with their employees, which starts with being able to reach them. To make that possible, WFH employees need visibility and active contact options.
  • Motivation: For sustained motivation, agents need to feel that they are on a path toward definite goals, with timely, personalized, and real-time recognition of their progress, and rewards for their successes.
  • Development: Employers need to periodically help their employees develop professionally or to correct non-productive behavior with targeted interventions or guidance; this enables employees to self-improve while working at home.

Agents and their supervisors are also facing new challenges due to the blurring of the boundary between work and home. As the dining room table doubles as an office, it can be hard for employees to separate their personal and professional lives.

“In this new work-from-home reality that we’re living in, it’s particularly challenging for segmentors, people who like to keep a sharp line between work and home,” Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard told Forbes.

On the one hand, remote work can lead to the expectation that an employee will be available at all times. On the other, disruptions run rampant; researchers have found that it can take an employee an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully resume the previous task following a disruption.  As contact centers moved their agents to a WFH model, we saw a 400% increase in the use of self-service scheduling to better balance work and home commitments, while meeting the needs of the organization.

In the contact center, the blurring of the distinction between work and the rest of life when agents work from home directly causes challenges in three key areas:

  • Staffing agility: Employers need to be able to respond quickly to changing customer demand, while employees need more flexible scheduling options and the tools to make last-minute changes.
  • Occupancy: Employers need to maintain optimal occupancy levels, a key KPI for many contact centers, while also ensuring that agents are focused on the task at hand. Yet, employees are more easily interrupted and distracted while working at home.
  • ConsistencyEmployers need to ensure that teams operate with consistency and reliability, especially during uncertain times. WFH employees tend to be less consistent and more unreliable due to the needs of the home, as well as to a higher rate of burnout. A recent report found that one-fourth of US employees are currently experiencing burnout, much of which can be linked to the lack of work-home boundaries.

Our professional boundaries have changed indelibly. And we can expect the challenges this has created to persist: 74% of CFOs who were surveyed recently said they intend to make remote work permanent for some employees, according to Gartner. These challenges can be addressed from the perspective of the employer or the agent, as resolving them for one invariably resolve them for the other.

Learn more about how to address WFH challenges in the two upcoming blogs in this series on their root causes, the separation between employees and their workplaces and the blurring of boundaries in during the home-based workday. You can also find out more about how TD Bank helps its contact center agents independently manage their schedules by reading our case study.

Do you need help in generating more efficient schedules and automating the challenge of optimizing your net staffing?

Download our complimentary eBook:  Intelligent Automation and Simulation in WFM for Dummies.

This book will help you understand how using machine learning based simulation can help create schedules based on true multi-skill efficiencies based on ACD routing rules and skills not just static percentages. It will also help you see how you can automatically and proactively create offers for voluntary time off and overtime based on skills to the exact right agents, thus solving the age-old issue of net staffing optimization.

How real-time feedback helps drive lasting change

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By Lauren Maschio, Product Marketing Portfolio Manager, Enterprise WFO

How to give people feedback, according to Harvard Business Review, is one of the hottest topics in business today. A key problem with feedback, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall wrote, is that people are “unreliable raters of other humans.”

“This phenomenon is called the idiosyncratic rater effect, and it’s large (more than half of your rating of someone else reflects your characteristics, not hers) and resilient (no training can lessen it),” Buckingham and Goodall asserted.

Human listening is neither consistent nor cost-effective – two people evaluating the same call often disagree whether the agent showed empathy, for example. In the end, agents don’t trust the process because they’re being measured based on a handful of calls each month, and supervisors don’t trust the process because it puts them in the difficult situation of justifying their assessment of the calls.

To overcome this challenge, contact centers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to give agents immediate and accurate feedback. A comprehensive AI framework can provide a consistent, accurate and unbiased score of the agent soft skill behaviors proven through decades of research to drive customer satisfaction – on every single interaction.

AI contact center technology can deliver behavioral insights that reside in the so-called “big data,” where pre-built models have been developed based on millions of hours of customer interactions. AI is delivering dividends, too: A recent survey by Aberdeen Research found that contact centers using AI are enjoying 3.3 times higher customer retention, 3.5 times more satisfied customers and 2.4 times higher agent productivity.

By adding real-time interaction guidance, agents get immediate feedback on how to change the conversation when a customer is expressing frustration. That’s important because while contact centers invest a lot of time and resources into coaching agents to improve behavior, agents often struggle during interactions to retain, recall and apply skills learned in coaching sessions. In fact, research shows that people forget about 50% of the new information they receive in training sessions within an hour. A day later, they’ve forgotten 70% of the material, and one week later, they’ve forgotten on average fully 90% of the coaching.

With real-time interaction guidance, agents receive desktop prompts and specific recommendations, such as how to build rapport or acknowledge loyalty, to have a more engaging conversation. Real-time interaction guidance enables agents to self-correct in the moment and reinforces skills they have already learned in a coaching session.

“Feedback is most meaningful in the moment,” Shani Harmon and Renee Cullinan wrote in Forbes.  “Feedback loops are critical for individual and organizational learning. Without them, we cannot improve.”

Learn more about how contact centers are using AI-powered real-time guidance to help agents while an interaction is in progress, giving them the feedback and coaching

NICE CX Excellence Awards 2020 – Winners revealed

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

NICE has announced the winners of its CX Excellence Awards 2020, with inning organisations honoured for leveraging innovation to drive exceptional customer and employee experiences and improve the bottom line.

The 16 award winners across five categories will be recognised at Interactions Live, NICE’s first-ever virtual conference highlighting the path to uncompromising customer service via best practices for agility, flexibility and adaptability in today’s changing reality.

The winners were also featured in a commemorative digital magazine which highlights how they used innovation to provide brand-differentiating customer service.

The CX Excellence Award winners span a variety of industries including financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail, telecommunications, utilities and more. Winners demonstrated remarkable results in one of five categories:

  • Best Cloud Implementation – Highlighting the flawless roll-out of novel cloud-based solutions while enjoying a complete, omnichannel customer experience suite in the cloud. Winners also exhibited rapid innovation cycles and elasticity via their cloud-native platform deployments. The winners are:
    • Farmers Insurance
    • HireRight
    • Trupanion
  • Best Business Impact – Driving quantifiable improvements in KPIs across multiple business areas including customer satisfaction, net promoter score (NPS), agent engagement, operational efficiency and revenue growth. The winners are:
    • Banco BMG
    • Northwestern Mutual
    • Teleflora
  • Best Customer Experience – Achieving a deep understanding of customers’ personalities and journeys to improve customer experience through advanced, real-time analytics. The winners are:
    • KeyBank
    • Michigan Department of State Information Center
    • Valvoline
  • Best Employee Engagement – Boosting workforce engagement and empowerment and demonstrating excellence in transparency, retention and motivation strategies. The winners are:
    • Sallie Mae
    • TD Bank
    • Vera Bradley
  • Rookie of the Year – Demonstrating excellence in the rapid adoption and implementation of best practices, achieving rapid ROI. The winners are:
    • LPL Financial
    • PSCU
    • US Bank
    • Wine Country Gift Baskets

Barak Eilam, CEO, NICE said: “We believe innovation is the critical path to success both in dynamic times as well as in measured ones. These organizations define what it means to be CX Agile in ensuring exceptional experiences even as market conditions evolve, and we’re proud to celebrate them. We remain committed to developing novel technologies that allow our customers to make a meaningful impact on the lives of their consumers in any business environment. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the award applicants and winners for sharing their successes with us this year.”

Click here to access the commemorative digital magazine showcasing how the winners used innovation to drive service excellence.

How gamification increases employee productivity in the contact centre

960 640 Noa Shlomo

By Noa Shlomo, Product Manager, NICE

With more employees working from home than ever before, contact center leaders have had to rethink how they maintain business as usual and continue driving toward organizational goals. In this new environment, gamification has emerged as a critical way of ensuring employee productivity and engagement.

Contact center employees who made an overnight transition to working from home face a number of roadblocks to their usual ways of working. New distractions, such as children, pets and other family members who are in the home during the workday, vie for employees’ attention. And while in the past employees might have simply walked over to a co-worker’s or supervisor’s desk to ask a question, share an update or ask how they’re doing, those interactions aren’t possible anymore. There’s no opportunity for impromptu watercooler conversations or catchup time over a cup of coffee. Every communication and meeting must be scheduled ahead of time, and when communication becomes difficult, people tend to avoid it.

That can leave workers disconnected from their peers and the organization’s goals and vision; according to a study from Workplace by Facebook, only 14% of remote employees feel connected to headquarters and the leadership team. Workers who feel disconnected from their workplace are typically less engaged and therefore less productive. Organizations with a high level of engagement report 22% higher productivity in addition to lower absenteeism and turnover, Gallup has found. 

How contact centers are leveraging gamification

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. It’s similar to  when you wear a Fitbit or Apple Watch; gathering those points or receiving a digital reward when meeting a step goal or other activity target and is motivating.  In the contact center, gamification involves using activities and processes with game elements, such as pursuits, quests,  and other gaming exercises, with usually multiple levels and potentialy some collaboration elements , that can come with point and rewards, to help employees  solve problems or increase their capabilities.

Studies have found that gamification drives intrinsic motivation and feelings of autonomy and competency among employees. In addition, 83% of employees surveyed in a recent report said that gamification makes them feel more motivated, and 61% who had not received gamified training said they feel bored and unproductive.

Gamification drives employee productivity and engagement in four key ways:

  • Interactive activities are broken down into levels that address specific KPIs and keep employees concentrated and task-driven. Typically, gamified elements are split into smaller objectives that feel achievable, which is an important element of training given employees’ new, distraction-filled work environments. Employees earn badges or rewards as they complete tasks, and incremental work improvements help them feel mastery of key skills.
  • With many employees being onboarded remotely, it can be a struggle to ensure that they’re learning the most crucial skills for their positions. Game elements like targeted trivia sessions allow contact centers to track how new and existing employees are improving and provide additional training as needed. The sessions can be designed in a way that allows managers and supervisors to target the areas employees need to focus on most. It’s also great for existing employees to learn new materials or processes.
  • When employees reach an gamification objective or answer trivia questions correctly, they can earn points that can be used to make purchases in a rewards marketplace. The more they participate in gamified training, the more points they earn to purchase fun perks. Supervisors can track improvements toward targeted KPIs along the way. The leader boards and badges, that are earned, also create a competitive spirit among the teams and peers, further motivating individuals to successfully complete the activities.
  • Completing work in a fun and captivating way helps employees set aside distractions at home. Gamification increases engagement, which Gallup found leads to a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity.

Each of these benefits contributes to more productive employees and adds substantial value to contact centers’ bottom line. A productive and engaged employee can contribute as much as $9,880 in additional value annually over a less productive, less engaged employee. Lack of performance and engagement, also contributes to the fact, that on average, most contact centers face 40% turnover.  In a contact center with 2,000 employees, for example, reduced engagement and productivity could cost as much as $3.2 million each year.

Everybody wins with gamification

By adding gamification to a contact center’s repertoire of training and engagement programs, contact centers can achieve higher levels of productivity and empower remote employees to engage with work in a fun and rewarding way. Read this whitepaper to see how you can leverage gamification to coach at-home agents effectively.

RPA: A key factor driving success in the COVID-19 era  

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By Catherine Gurwitz (pictured), Product Marketing Manager, NICE

Organizations around the world are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) to become more agile and efficient in the face of increased demand and rapidly changing environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. While call centers become increasingly aware of the necessity of a remote workforce, organizations are realizing the benefits of automation.

Leveraging RPA for COVID-19 challenges

Industries like healthcare, financial services and the public sector have rapidly mobilized resources to help people cope with the financial, health and practical challenges of life during a pandemic. But along with the growing volumes of service queries they face during the COVID-19 crisis, these organizations have been asked to allow their employees to work from home where possible.

The sudden need to accommodate remote work has put contact centers under enormous pressure. At this trying time, it is more important than ever to provide responsive, personalized and compassionate customer service. But providing a consistent customer experience in a distributed working environment can be challenging.

The pressures of responding to customers who may be anxious or ill can be overwhelming for remote employees used to working in a structured corporate environment. There are also the challenges of rapidly scaling up for demand and ensuring continuance in case employees cannot work because they fall ill or need to self-isolate.

RPA and COVID-19

Many organizations are turning to software robots for assistance. Robotic process automation (RPA) in the back-office and virtual assistants (attended automation) on employees desktops are helping enterprises to keep pace with growing service demands, support colleagues working from home, and ensure business continuity during these challenging times.

For companies wrestling with the challenges of COVID-19, RPA offers wide-ranging benefits. Every organization has clerical, time-consuming tasks that demand accuracy and speed, but don’t require decision-making to accomplish. Companies that have needed to downscale or even shut down normal contact center and back-office operations will have experienced a backlog in service requests such as changes of address or new account applications, for instance. Unattended robots are a perfect fit for tasks like those, which involve searching, cutting and pasting, updating the same data in multiple places, moving data around, and collating simple and repetitive items. Unattended bots, running on servers in the backend, can perform just about any rule-based work by interacting with applications.

With the escalating call volumes and back-office backlogs companies face due to COVID-19, unattended robots can power through high volumes of many admin driven tasks, such as: address changes, refund claims, orders, generation of customer letters and other tasks without any manual intervention required.  Everyone wins in this scenario: the customer gets a convenient experience and a quick response, employees can focus on complex, more personal interactions rather than on tedious manual work, and the company benefits from optimized efficiency and productivity.

Attended Automation, RPA and COVID-19 efficiencies

In the context of COVID-19, RPA really comes into its own when it is combined with an attended automation solution. Attended and unattended solutions working together can help organizations scale up and improve responsiveness at a time when contact centers are under enormous pressure because physical channels are closed for business.

At this time, employees may be facing a growing pile of paperwork and manual data capture requirements as national lockdowns begin to ease. An attended bot can help them catch up with the backlog. But it also improves engagement by helping them work efficiently to help each customer and freeing them from tedious work which machines can handle better.

Attended automation solutions can also capture data from scanned claim forms or faxes by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and then update back-office systems with the new data. The employee does not need to expend energy on this type of tedious, low-value task, allowing them to get more done and to focus on the human side rather than on data capture.

One common frustration for customer service employees is the requirement to cut and paste customer information from one system to another, or even to recapture data that exists in one corporate system in a different application. An attended automation solution can auto-populate forms in a blink of an eye, then allow the agent to add or change details as necessary, in real-time.

Attended automation is also a boon when front office employees need to work across multiple applications and systems. It can streamline laborious processes such as collecting data from numerous disparate systems and present it all in a single view for the agent. It can also perform real-time calculations for the agent and present a view of summarized customer data.

Challenges of remote work and automation

Since many employees are working remotely due to COVID-19, they are unable to turn directly to colleagues or supervisors for help and support. Virtual assistants have a valuable potential role to play in supporting remote employees – keeping them engaged, informed and connected. They can also prompt employees to follow company guidelines, policies and procedures – all in real-time.

This helps the organization to ensure regulatory compliance and maintain consistency of the customer experience. When a company changes processes or policies, the employee virtual assistant can help to quickly align staff to any changes. It can also enable front- line agents to speak in a coherent voice by providing them with contextually relevant guidance scripts in real-time.

When there are both attended and unattended process bots at work, in the event of a process exception or error, an attended bot can refer a request to a human worker for intervention when it cannot complete a task. The human worker can then ‘collaborate’ with their attended bot to resolve a process error or complication, in real-time. The automated flow can then resume without any downtime.

Succeeding with attended automation and RPA in the COVID era

Quickly getting to grips with attended automation and RPA, during this unpredictable and turbulent time can better equip call centers, agents and end customers to better adjust to this new reality and achieve success.  For more information on how to empower your remote workforce to click here.

How AI and automation help contact centers be agile in the COVID-19 era

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By Paul Chance, NICE

As widespread shutdowns went into effect, contact centers had to make an overnight shift to remote work – a significant undertaking in an industry that has historically relied on physical office spaces to bring together and manage the agents who are critical to solving customers’ needs. Agents and contact center leaders, many of whom were taking their organizations remote for the first time ever, learned and adapted on the go.

Now, with many organizations starting to make plans for reopening and thinking about how they can adapt to a multitude of different in-office or remote work scenarios, it has become clear that new strategies and technology tools are needed to help contact centers stay agile.  There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future, and contact centers must put the right solutions in place to be able to react swiftly as business conditions change.

In this environment, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are making nimbleness a reality for contact centers by helping leaders adapt scheduling, planning, hiring, forecasting and intraday management to in-the-moment changes.

AI-driven workforce management enables more accurate decision-making

When AI is embedded into workforce management, contact center leaders gain tools that can accurately predict outcomes in a wide range of scenarios and take much of guesswork and time out of lengthy planning and research needs.

  • Long-term and “what-if” planning. With so much in flux today, determining the right staffing levels needed to meet specific KPIs is particularly challenging. AI makes it easy to incorporate a multitude of variables and specific business requirements into long-term planning and empowers contact centers to problem-solve between staffing requirements and performance gaps. Its meticulous predictions increase long-term forecasting accuracy by 6 to 10%.
  • Hiring the right agents. The lack of face-to-face interaction right now adds a new layer to hiring – how can contact centers make sure they’re choosing the right people? With AI embedded in workforce management, contact centers can use voice analysis to objectively assesses candidates’ aptitude, engagement and performance and determine which candidates are likely to be high-value employees.
  • Forecast accurately and effectively. Forecasting typically takes substantial research and knowledge of the contact center as well as deep expertise in numerous forecasting methods. AI-driven workforce management enables managers to focus their efforts on higher-value tasks by assessing which forecasting methods will be the most accurate in a given situation, pinpointing unseen patterns in data and automatically adjusting to new circumstances – ultimately increasing accuracy and efficiency.
  • Simulate real-world scenarios. The downstream impacts of staffing decisions are incredibly difficult to predict manually, but AI and machine learning can demonstrate exactly how changes to on-hand agent skills, call prioritization, routing and other variables impact service levels.

Automation makes real-time contact center schedule changes possible

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, customer demand can change in an instant – and so can the available pool of agents. Automation empowers contact centers to simulate impacts on KPIs throughout the day and several weeks into the future, after the schedule is published. It enables automatic adjustments to meet customer demand without overstaffing or understaffing.    

  • Fix staffing gaps. As staffing needs change throughout the day, automation within workforce management solutions identifies variances that lead to overstaffing and understaffing. It then brings staffing in line with contact center business needs by automatically offering agents shift swaps, voluntary time off, extra hours and more – but only when changes will benefit the business. There’s no need for heavy monitoring or intervention by a manager.
  • Increase agent engagement. Automation enables contact centers to eliminate some of agents’ biggest frustrations, such as missed shift or overtime opportunities, a lack of flexibility in their schedules and slow approval for schedule change requests. This increases agent engagement, a top driver of productivity, which is essential right now given the distractions agents face at home. 

Whether a contact center is fully remote, working from the office or some blend of the two, the ability to adapt quickly is essential right now – and AI and automation make it possible to do so with workforce management. Learn more about how technologies are empowering contact center agility right now in our ebook on Leveraging AI and Intelligent Automation in the WFM Suite.

For more information please click here.

Connect ESAT to CSAT in Times of Crisis: NICE introduces WEM@home

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At a time when human connections matter most, are your frontline employees empowered to perform, and inspired to care? Are you doing all you can to keep your agents engaged and motivated?

Now, more than ever, every moment in the customer journey matters. The COVID-19 crisis has evolved to render face-to-face touchpoints less frequent, thereby highlighting the value of connected experiences in channels from phone to chat to SMS text.

Contact centre agents are in a unique position to deliver personalised, seamless omnichannel customer experiences that synthesise a variety of interactions – and to put the “care” in “customer care”. To this end, contact centre leaders that use actionable insights gained from agent experience feedback can inform successful evolution in times of disruption.

Would your agents recommend your company to a friend?

Employees, when engaged and empowered with the right tools and training, can be your most valuable brand asset – and increase customer loyalty while reducing customer churn.  Successful companies use the power of Net Promoter Score (NPS) along with direct, indirect and operational customer feedback to refine and deliver superior customer experiences, all along a holistic journey. Just as NPS reflects customer experiences from the outside in, it is equally as important to gain insights from the inside out.  Would your agents recommend your company to a friend? How they feel about their experience directly reflects to the experience they provide to the customer.

With insight comes opportunity

Especially in times of crisis, Voice of the Employee (VoE) and agent experience insights are a key part of the holistic feedback mechanism that powers customer experience management. Enhancements to customer experience cannot be accomplished without a keen understanding of the customer experience agent.  How do they feel about their ability to successfully engage when their work environment changes? Do they have the tools they need to deliver? This critical connection cannot be overlooked when working situations evolve. As the human connection to your brand, you must understand their situation and align to their changing needs.

Igniting a holistic CEM program that elevates CSAT

Times of crisis offer an opportunity to authentically engage with your customers, as well as your employees. This open outreach can nurture a collective appreciation of individual feedback that can shift CX programs into high gear. When agents on the front lines feel their feedback is important – their voice is heard – spirits are lifted, and that is infectious. Opening that feedback channel can inspire an ongoing, company-wide culture that not only elevates performance, but values input. And it is that input that is critical to a holistic understanding of all experiences that affect CSAT.

Our challenging times have surfaced human connections as a premium. As contact centre agents connect with your customers, it is more important than ever to connect to their input. With a durable, integrated feedback framework, agents can be inspired to see problems, find solutions, and feel more accountable to a holistic customer experience that delivers on your brand promise.

Integrated feedback management is an essential tool to gather and synthesise actionable frontline insights. NICE Satmetrix offers integrated listening for a 360 degree understanding of multidimensional behaviours that impact customer loyalty. To learn more about how you can gather and use employee experience feedback to drive engagement, and gain visibility and ensure performance, visit wem@home.

NICE release special home working solution in response to COVID-19

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

By NICE inContact

We live in a world where the only constant is change.  As we experience together the COVID 19 global pandemic and its impacts on our daily lives, the necessity of being able to adapt is very clear. In addition to the massive strains on the healthcare systems around the globe, the business world we live in is also severely impacted.  With the disruption of supply chains resulting in shortages of goods, to the current and impending layoffs of employees around the globe, the world we live in is changing at a faster pace that anyone could expect. This makes the Financial Crisis of 2009 look minor in comparison, as people are concerned about both their financial and physical well-being.

These changes hold true for contact centers given the critical role they play in business. As the front line to customers, they too need to adjust to our new reality.  Customer demands on agents are higher than ever but the safety of the contact center agents is also critical given the nature of the crisis.  How does one balance customer demands with the new reality of “social distancing”?  The roles of governments also come into play where some have restricted or eliminated freedom of movement which causes agents to be unable to get to the office. This results in businesses not being able to provide the services and support that customers expect.  Lost revenues and customers, and potentially the total closure of the business itself are inevitable for those without a plan to quickly adjust to this new reality.

Some businesses failed to have strong business continuity plans, but there are others that were preparing for any eventuality.  This includes preparing their contact center agents to work from home leveraging a cloud based technology.  Understanding how to manage the human resource elements from hiring to performance management is also a critical part of the plan.  Here are just a few best practices you should focus on when moving your contact center agents to work from home.

NICE inContact are offering CXone@home to help companies transition in 48 hours their contact center agents to a home-based work environment, at no cost for 45 days.

Choose the Right Cloud Solution
A full suite of AI and Analytics driven applications from compliance, workforce and performance management to automation.

Equip Workers with the Tools They Need to Succeed
Remote contact center workers and supervisors need the same access to applications and tools as they do when in the office.

Ensure You Transition the Right Existing People to be Remote Agents
Employees need to be self-motivated, resourceful, mindful of the importance of confidentiality (with customer data) as well as technically oriented.

Make Experts Readily Available
Employees need ready access to the companies knowledge bank of information in real time.  This should include things like attended robotic process automation.

Utilize Tools and Reporting to Track Agent Activity, Goals, and Metrics
Allow managers to effectively monitor teams remotely through things like call monitoring and recording as we as deliver effective performance management.

Optimize Skill Development with Distance and AI Driven Personalized Learning
Using distance learning or eLearning technologies to certify agents on new campaigns or products.

The crisis we are now facing should cause many of those in the contact center industry to rethink the way they do business.  Now is the time to move your contact center to the cloud to weather the storm we are currently in and be ready for those yet to come because we will always live in a world of constant change.

Learn more about CXone@home here. https://get.niceincontact.com/cxoneathome

Millennials and Gen Zs ‘driving digital-first customer experience’

960 640 Stuart O'Brien

The third annual 2019 NICE inContact Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark has detailed how understanding younger generations’ use of and expectations around next-generation solutions like artificial intelligence (AI) and digital channels are fundamental to building exceptional, best-in-class customer experiences.

As Millennials and Generation Z become dominant consumer groups, with Generation Z purchasing already reaching an estimated $100 billion according to research conducted by Barkley, their comfort level and familiarity with multiple digital channels including social messaging and chatbots means organizations, no matter their size, must provide digital-first omnichannel experiences to meet consumer expectations and effectively compete in the experience economy.

Key findings from the study include:

  • Almost 60% of Generation Z and Millennials have used private social messaging for customer service. In contrast, 38% of Gen X, 19% of Baby Boomers and 16% of Silent Generation have done so.The majority of Generation Z and Millennials also want companies to allow them to interact with customer service using private social messaging apps (72% and 69%, respectively).
  • Consumers are using AI more and feeling more positive about chatbots over time.Half of all consumers have used AI for any purpose (50%), compared to 2018 (45%). This can be attributed to a significant increase in the use of an automated assistant/chatbot online (34%, up from 25% in 2018). Generation Z and Millennials are more likely to agree that chatbots make it easier and quicker for their issues to get resolved, and are also the most likely of all generations to have used all forms of AI for any purpose, as well as for customer service.
  • Half of consumers who start with AI are transferred to a live agent, and age is a significant factor when it comes to AI and the importance of the human touch. While chatbot usage and performance are improving – and preferences and attitudes are changing – most consumers want to be informed if they are using a chatbot (92%) and 91% of all consumers prefer a live agent. However, this preference follows a downward trend generationally: 98% of the Silent Generation, 96% of Baby Boomers, 91% of Generation X, 86% of Millennials and 83% of Generation Z say they prefer a live agent.
  • Seamless digital-first omnichannel experiences are vital to positive customer experiences.Most consumers (93%) want seamless omnichannel experiences, and yet they are increasingly giving companies a poor rating on seamlessly switching between channels – 73% give companies a poor rating, up from 67% in 2018. This is especially important for meeting and exceeding the expectations of Millennials and Generation Z, who are the most likely to have experienced omnichannel customer service (16% and 21%, respectively).

“Understanding the nuances of what consumers expect, and how they actually engage with brands via a myriad of digital channels, and integrating these in-demand channels seamlessly to deliver digital-first omnichannel experiences, is key to sustainable growth,” said Paul Jarman, NICE inContact CEO. “The NICE inContact CX Benchmark looks beyond education around demographic customer service trends and gets to the root of what makes new channel options attractive. Millennials and Generation Z are bellwethers of what consumers expect and are increasingly likely to recommend a company on social media based on personal experiences – the influence they wield is tremendous.”

Click here to read the full report.