Navigating & Adapting Your Contact Centre For the Future

As the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions slowly start to ease, businesses are now turning their attention to reopening and looking forward. Organisations, particularly contact centres are now operating in a world that already looks different to the one we left a few months ago.

It’s an everchanging landscape, where contact centres now need to be thinking strategically rather than tactfully, so we thought it timely to team up with our partners NICE inContact, to deliver an insightful webinar on how you can navigate and adapt your contact centre throughout the next phase of events the lockdown restrictions may bring.

We’ve summarised the key points from our webinar in this article:

• How to make ‘working from home’, work for agents, customers and you
• What are some of the best practices to consider when remote working?
  • Establishing your contact centre foundation
  • Adapting your contact centre scheduling
  • Managing your contact centre agent performance
• Maintaining business continuity within the contact centre
• Why CXone@home might be better than your current ACD for a productive work from home set up
• How to navigate towards the future contact centre

How to Make ‘Working From Home’, Work For Agents, Customers & You

The pandemic has forced contact centres to trial new ways of working including working from home (WFH), which will most likely continue in this current climate, where according to one of the polls we ran during the webinar, 35% of you are considering allowing your agents to continue working from home post COVID.

WFH has been a new experience for most contact centres.

According to research carried out a month ago, only 10% of employers had already had some experience implementing a work from home strategy, compared to a staggering 50% who had no experience.[i]

The benefits of working from home has been spoken about many times pre-pandemic. From an agent perspective, some of the benefits include:

• No commute
• Healthier work/life balance
• Increased productivity/focus
• Ability to widen recruitment pool by looking for agents in other geographic locations

In fact, according to statistics, working from home means an 80% better retention rate for contact centre agents[i].

A WFH home model allows agents more flexibility with their work/life balance. Stats also show that this way of working means 57% of agents are more likely to endorse their employer[ii] and therefore stay with the company for longer. In turn, a reduction in retention rates will help contact centres save time, money and resource spent hiring and training new staff.

Looking after the well-being of your agents in turns means looking after your customers. Ensuring employees are treated in a way that stimulates loyalty, encourages them to serve customers well.

And let’s not forget, that from a business perspective, one of the major benefits of working from home means organisations can reduce their real estate footprint saving a large sum each year.

Although WFH may have positive benefits, stats also show that 71% of contact centre managers have said it has impacted their customer experience[iii]. This may be to do with the beginning of lockdown when contact centres were struggling to get everything set up in order to work remotely.

Most of these issues, such as agent devices not working or configurations not being set up correctly, have been addressed or acknowledged.

What we are seeing now is contact centres struggling to maintain and monitor the agent experience whilst working remotely, where according to another poll we ran, 22% of you are lacking full visibility into your service quality and productivity.

Best practices for contact centres to consider when remote working

As more organisations consider working from home post pandemic due to the benefits it can bring to a workforce, consider the following steps to help get yourself set up more permanently:

Establish the foundation

• Connectivity
  Pilot your connectivity if possible. If not, take a “first 48 hours and adapt” approach
• Infrastructure
  Understand capacity and physical limits with direct (e.g. ACD) and shared (e.g. VPN) resources
• Devices
  Consider total cost of agent PCs, software, and IT help desk time to configure/install/fix their setup ongoing
• Flexibility
  Ensure you can quickly modify scripts for IVR, contact flows and priority, hours of operation, etc.

Adapting your contact centre scheduling

• Shorter shifts
  Think about adapting your scheduling not just from a business perspective, but also an agents one. Offering agents shorter shifts for example, can provide flexibility for agents in terms of work/life balance and might also work well for you in meeting spikes in traffic at different times of the day.
• Automatic Approvals
  Validate the process used for adds, moves and changes. Set as many auto approvals as you can.
• Meetings
  Establish regular touch points with supervisors and peers. Optimise the best times for the business based on customer demand and agent schedules.

Manage contact centre Agent performance

• Transition
  Support agents in transition with frequent communication regarding temporarily relaxed contact centre metrics/goals. For example, stats show that during lockdown, Average Handle Time (AHT) has risen. This may be due to queries becoming more complex or even customers looking for more empathy and support during their phone call. Make sure you are explaining the reasoning behind metrics/goals and why some may have been relaxed compared to what you had in the office environment.
• Transparency
  Track and share agent activity, goals, and metrics, validating with screen and audio recording
• Coaching
  Consider doubling coaching time as a rule of thumb and applying analytics for targeted feedback. Why not also highlight the areas where certain agents are doing an exceptional job and share this with the rest of the team so those qualities can be replicated? Gamification can also work well within the contact centre environment, building a culture of engagement and healthy competition.

Related Content: Download our Work From Home Agent Checklist

Maintaining Business Continuity Within The Contact Centre

At the start of lockdown, businesses were working hard to maintain business continuity and move their agents to a work from home model.

One of the solutions we offered at the beginning of March was CXone@home – a cloud contact centre solution. CXone@home is a special offer specifically generated during COVID to ensure business continuity and elasticity and is being offered via 60 days no commitment no contract offering.

Since lockdown has started to ease, we are now seeing customers taking this offer up not from a rapid deployment perspective, but more of a strategic one.

Contact centres are now evaluating the tactical solutions they made a few months ago in the rush to get their workforce remote and are now seeing the limitations their current set up has.

CXone@home, as mentioned above is a cloud contact centre platform. The benefits of using a cloud platform have been spoken about greatly. Some of the benefits include:

• Less hardware, less hassle
  Cloud based contact centre solutions are faster to deploy and cheaper to maintain. They do not require the complexity of maintaining the hardware as an on-premise system would and their set up and services is much simpler.
• Easily support multiple, global contact centres and at-home agents (particularly during emergencies)
  Cloud contact centre solutions can be set up on a subscription basis meaning that adding and removing users is easy. Flexibility is a key benefit of a cloud platform. With a good internet connection, agents can also easily work remotely. With an on-premise system, getting set up to work remotely can be harder, which can have an impact on the level of customer service you are delivering during this time.
• Consolidated contact centre infrastructure
  Cloud contact centre solutions allow you to consolidate your infrastructure, PBX and telecom suppliers with one vendor. In addition, with cloud solutions, it is extremely simple to add on additional functionality (such as Workforce Management, Robotic Process Automation or Speech Analytics for example). This functionality can be added with no new hardware required.

Related Content: Download The Inner Circle Guide to Cloud Based Contact Centre Solutions

Why might CXone@home be better than your current ACD for a productive work from home set up?

Does your existing ACD support remote agents?

CXone@home ability:

• All agents can be moved to a work from home model within 48 hours
• No VPN required
• No hardware required – immediate elasticity
• No costly and time-consuming upgrades required

Are your current agent device requirements sustainable?

CXone@home ability:

• Simple to support: browser and internet connection
• Can use low cost Chromebook
• No installs or PC config for IT to troubleshoot per agent
• Intuitive, consolidated agent desktop

Do your agents and supervisors have full app access whilst working from home?

CXone@home ability:

• Remote agent support for voice and all digital channels
• Out of the box embedded agent UI with leading CRMs
• Complete suite of WFO and analytics for agent productivity

Navigating Toward the Future Contact Centre

The challenge that most organisations may now come across is finding the balance between protecting the factors, processes and change which supports the core of their organisation, whilst also being open minded to new methods and making sure this is met with the same speed we have seen throughout this pandemic.

Although it may be tempting to return to the familiar, it’s also important to remember the innovation which was seen over the past few months and making sure we are keeping this going by evaluating what has worked and what hasn’t for success going forward.

We may have been forced into this path of remote working and it may have happened a lot quicker than most of us were comfortable with, but now that the pandemic has shone the light on a new way of working which some may say was always inevitable, it’s the organisations who ride the wave and accept that change is constant, that will be in the strongest position to succeed.

If you didn’t get a chance to catch the webinar, then catch it on replay! >

If you would like more information on any of the topics or technologies mentioned in this article, then please get in touch with our team >

Source: https://www.businesssystemsuk.co.uk/blog/2020/06/10/navigating-adapting-your-contact-centre-for-the-future/

2023 Buyers Guide

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Computer Telephony Integration

 

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Premium Listing Call Center Studio Call Center Studio Call Center Studio is the world’s first call center built on Google and is one of the most secure and stable systems with some of the industry’s best reporting. It is one of the most full-featured enterprise grade systems (with the most calling features, one of the best call distribution, outbound dialing features and integrations—including IVR, AI Speech Recognition, blended inbound/outbound calling and includes Google’s new Dialogflow and Speech API. Call Center Studio is the absolute easiest to use (with a 10 minute setup), and is the price performance leader with lower equipment cost and less setup time.

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AMC Technology DaVinci DaVinci provides Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) to a library of pre-built applications + UXiPaaS (User Experience Integration Platform as a Service) built specifically for contact centers. As contact center needs evolve, organizations need to have access to extend or create new functionality, without waiting to be a part of a software roadmap. Get the benefits of CTI within your CRM like screen pop, click-to-dial, screen transfer, speed dial and more, but future-proof your contact center so you can expand and integrate how and when you want.

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ComSys S.A. CLink for CRM and Call Center Integration CLink by Comsys is a middleware that connects in real-time the CRM and the contact center applications. CLink enhances the CRM with interaction management capabilities from the contact center that allow agents to work more productively across all communication channels. Comsys is a provider of οmnichannel customer engagement solutions that assist companies around the world in delivering unique customer experiences. For the last 15 years, Comsys designs and implements complex projects for clients from the outsourcing, financial services, telecommunications, and retail sectors. Comsys enjoys strategic partnerships with technology vendors like Cisco®, Aspect Software®, and Microsoft® for the delivery of innovative interaction management and contact center optimization solutions.

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Consilium Software Consilium UniAgent™ Today’s call centers need their agents to work more naturally, and respond better and faster. Here, we talk about the innovations Consilium has made with the latest desktop and mobile agent releases of the UniAgent™ CRM connector. From small enterprises to Fortune 500 companies and governments across 110 countries, UniAgent™ comes into action right at the moment of reckoning, making every contact center experience engaging and personalized, powered by simplified customer identification and anticipating customer needs. UniAgent™ provides CRM integrations between all the Cisco contact center solutions (UCCX, PCCE, UCCE and HCS-CC) and over 20 CRMs, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365... (read more)Today’s call centers need their agents to work more naturally, and respond better and faster. Here, we talk about the innovations Consilium has made with the latest desktop and mobile agent releases of the UniAgent™ CRM connector. From small enterprises to Fortune 500 companies and governments across 110 countries, UniAgent™ comes into action right at the moment of reckoning, making every contact center experience engaging and personalized, powered by simplified customer identification and anticipating customer needs. UniAgent™ provides CRM integrations between all the Cisco contact center solutions (UCCX, PCCE, UCCE and HCS-CC) and over 20 CRMs, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle Service Cloud & Siebel, BMC Remedy, Sugar CRM, ServiceNow, SAP C4C, FreshDesk, and more. Consilium UniAgent™ CRM connectors are proven in over 110 countries with thousands of agents globally. Enterprises are proactively working towards enhancing their Customer Experience (CX) strategy to optimize omnichannel interaction throughout the customer lifecycle. Consilium UniAgent™ is delivering this as a Connected Digital Experience, being at the center of the agent and customer interaction. The 8.0 release of UniAgent™ is designed to help organizations deliver intuitive, contextual and experience-driven customer service across voice and digital channels (chat, SMS and social media.) As we enter the next stage of the global pandemic, contact centers are faced with the prospect of permanently allowing at least some of their agents to be Work-from-Home agents, without reducing the customer experience (CX.) UniAgent™ Mobile (UA™ Mobile) provides a mobile phone-based solution for Work-from-Home (WFH) agents, and can also be used from tablets or PC’s, all without the need for installing anything or requiring VPN. UniAgent™ is now available in a cloud-hosted deployment model. Our choices of subscription-based or owned-license pricing gives the flexibility customers and partners need. UniAgent™ can reduce call handling time, accelerate resolutions, and allow for faster call processing to reduce customer wait times in queue. Contact centers can shorten the total time agents spend on inbound and outbound calls, increasing agent productivity by up to 25% by providing customer information to an agent's desktop at the same time the customer call arrives. This cost saving alone can provide a rapid return on investment (ROI). In addition, quick resolution of customer concerns is possible because agents can now use the historical information in CRM’s to shorten call hold times and quickly address the problem. Finally, simple on-screen click-to-talk capabilities are integrated into the CRM screen, allowing agents to initiate outbound calls quickly. Features and Benefits • Automatic logging: Administrators and managers get Cisco CUIC reporting of all agent activity, and voice and non-voice contact activity is also saved to the CRM. • Omnichannel federation: Support for voice, chat, email, and Universal Queue/UQ routing with Single-Sign-On supported • One-click dialing: Agents need only to click on a phone number once in the CRM to place calls, saving time and removing the possibility of dialing wrong numbers. • Pre-packaged integration: Allows pre-packaged integration between CRM’s and the Cisco Unified Contact Center solutions for fast, easy installation, and easy upgrades when Cisco Unified Contact Center and CRM product versions change. • Full telephony functions: All telephony functions in the CRM agent desktop including phone control, caller identification, and screen pops • Proven architecture: A robust, proven architecture that has been successfully deployed for governments and Fortune 500 companies since 2008.

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PRILINK Easy Contact Center Traffic Analytics (Ec2Traffic) Prilink Ec2Traffic provides network traffic analytics (NTA) for Internet, SIP Trunk and WebRTC traffic for on-premises and cloud Contact Centers. Ec2Traffic analyzes network layer 2 to 4, RTP and SRTP packet loss and SIP protocols in real-time from the demarcation point or network edge, generating NTA metadata and requires little telemetry bandwidth. Ec2Traffic provides: - Year-round NTA metadata - Daily CSV files upload to Customer business applications - Capture packet to Wireshark for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) - detect traffic anomalies - and more ....

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