A J.D. Power poll showed that 86% of 124 customer service organizations they studied plan to implement a permanent WFH model post-panedmic. According to Contact Center experts SQM and based on an extensive study they conducted last year, in 2019, 19% of agents worked from home, and in 2021 87% of agents worked from home, a 350% increase.
While the global pandemic is increasingly seen in the rearview mirror, the impact it had on accelerating digital transformation in the CX and cloud contact center domains is inarguably permanent. In particular, the many benefits of migrating to home-based agents, who can serve customers through routing inbound calls quickly and seamlessly, is likely to be a permanent part of the business environment.
With a range of cloud contact center applications available, the future is clear – there is no longer a need to spend money on real estate and struggle to attract and retain great agents who truly wish to interact with and serve customers.
But, even with the most ideal software and cloud platforms, challenges remain. If conversations are difficult to understand due to audio quality issues, the investment in moving large BPOs to a better and more profitable model can be damaged.
This week, Nectar Services Corp. and Jabra announced a development partnership and solution that integrates telemetry from the latest, advanced Jabra headsets into Nectar's Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Together, the companies deliver an unprecedented experience making communication consistently more pleasant.
"Workplace communications have changed dramatically in the last few years," said Joseph Fuccillo, CTO at Nectar. "The ability to work from anywhere is a great benefit, but it has also introduced new challenges in ensuring that user and customer experience remains high. This partnership between Nectar and Jabra helps tackle them by incorporating data from Jabra's most advanced headsets into our platform."
Nectar and Jabra provide the visibility needed to fully understand every user's experience ear-to-ear and troubleshoot performance issues as they arise.
Nectar DXP monitors on-premises and cloud Unified Communication (UC) and Contact Center (CC) platforms (Avaya, Teams, Zoom, Genesys, etc.), providing insight into user experience, including call quality, endpoint health, and network performance. It tests remote worker voice and video performance, including device health, local ISP, and network analysis for the last mile. This new Nectar for Jabra integration extends user experience monitoring all the way down to the last millimeter.
Jabra metrics are presented in Nectar's easy-to-use dashboard, along with details from the call itself, allowing managed service help desk technicians or enterprise IT teams responsible for assuring the quality of service to see exactly what is going on and solve issues fast. Data from all platforms (and Jabra headsets) is then compiled into a user's personal “Jabra score” of call quality and enriched by Nectar's proprietary User Health Index, which summarizes their overall experience.
Nectar and Jabra's innovation improves the visibility of the conversation experience by enabling troubleshooting continually. IT support and contact center supervisors can be instantly alerted to issues like high levels of ambient noise, excessive crosstalk and silence, and network and headset issues, for example, a misplaced microphone that impacts call quality, for those in the office, and those working from home.
"Nectar and Jabra make an excellent team, improving the visibility of the conversation experience by enabling troubleshooting as issues arise," said Vern Fernandez, Senior Manager of Strategic Business and Alliance Development, Contact Center, Jabra. "This powerful integration brings next-level conversation insights to the table, feeding directly into the Nectar monitoring dashboards to simplify and speed up troubleshooting."
Out of the variety of technology platforms already available, digital experience platforms (DXP) are quickly becoming one of the most prominent out of the bunch. Forrester defines DXPs as software that provides the foundation for flexible, agnostic core services to maximize scale, quality, and insights across channels and systems while delivering context-specific tooling for practitioners to build, manage and optimize digital journeys on owned channels and orchestrate third-party experiences.
The technology can be beneficial regardless of industry – streamlining the digital experience delivery process accelerates time to market, reduces costs, and improves team productivity. That being said, DXP technology can be extremely advantageous for cloud contact centers in particular. A DXP can connect with other systems, such as CRMs, contact centers, and social media, which provides a 360-degree view of each customer, along with intuitive dashboards and machine learning power, which provides deep insights for contact center employees.
Furthermore, a DXP provides a centralized location to discreetly manage packaged business capabilities discreetly, providing a single login point to execute CX tasks, reducing friction for workers. Overall, the global DXP market size was valued at $12.2 billion at the end of 2022 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 14.23 percent, reaching a predicted value of $27.2 billion by 2028. However, as more cloud contact center organizations realize the benefits a DXP can provide, these numbers may rise past predictions as adoption within the industry skyrockets.
Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.Edited by
Erik Linask
