Workforce Management Featured Article
Meeting the Challenges Ahead for the Contact Center
While contact center managers are obliged to keep an eye on what’s happening in a company’s customer support operations today, a good manager also needs to ensure the contact center is prepared for what’s likely to come along tomorrow. While no one has a crystal ball, there are trends that should be watched carefully throughout the year.
While many companies are still struggling with mastering the idea of integrated multichannel operations, or “omnichannel” customer support, it cannot have missed most manager’s attention that mobile is also a trend to watch. More and more customers are using mobile devices to communicate with companies – many do so exclusively -- and this presents challenges to a company dedicated to offering high quality customer support. But it also presents opportunities, according to a recent article by Enghouse Interactive’s (News - Alert) John Cray, writing for Business2Community.
With such a massive infrastructure already in place, it’s likely that we’re going to see a significant expansion of mobile-based customer service applications this year and beyond. For example, companies are increasingly realizing that smartphones offer a readily available tool for customers to send images or videos of product issues directly to service representatives, which facilitates efficient communication and call resolutions.”
The mobile customer experience shouldn’t be an after-thought to traditional customer experience…an “add-on” stuck to desktop transaction. Instead, companies should take the opportunity to design a mobile customer support experience from scratch, using all the multimedia capabilities inherent in mobile devices to their advantage. Customers will be delighted, and they will keep coming back.
Another trend for 2015 in customer support, according to Cray, is the switch to home-based agents. Today, companies of all sizes, from giant business process outsourcing services providers to small in-house contact centers, are finding the home agent model of value as a way to keep the quality of customer support high and keep costs down. A study by Customer Contact Strategies found that more than 80 percent of contact centers today are following the home agent model, at least in part. A study by the National Association of Call Centers found that more than 70 percent of companies currently supporting at-home agents plan to increase their numbers in the future.
These trends, while they will save money and improve the quality of service, will require extra attention when it comes to workforce management, however. Ensuring that the right agents are in the right channels at the right time to service omnichannel customer interactions – particularly when agents are working from home and not on-site – will be a bigger challenge than ever before.
“As the contact center continues to sprawl beyond the four walls of the traditional call center, agents are becoming geographically dispersed, and the mobile channel continues to grow, contact center managers must find new ways to optimize their workforces,” wrote Cray. “A big part of this trend is an emphasis on ‘first contact resolution,’ solving the customer’s issue during their first interaction.”
This will likely require better trained agents who can work across channels, highly robust cloud-based workforce optimization solutions that can handle the complexity of the modern contact center, and real-time analytics, diagnostics and reporting. Going forward, your agents will need to work more collaboratively than ever with customers and with each other. Ensure that you’re prepared to support their efforts.