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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 onreplay! >
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 >
Acqueon's AI-driven conversational engagement software enables sales, marketing and service organizations to engage in emotionally connected dialogs with customers via their channel of choice for significantly improved results. The Acqueon suite adds multichannel campaign management, contact center analytics, desktop, and CRM connectors for your contact center software of choice, including Amazon Connect, Cisco, Nice inContact, and Twilio. Acqueon conversational engagement software leverages the Acqueon IQ platform to aggregate data from the various applications, assemble rich customer contexts, and drive next-best-action using powerful statistical and predictive models.
Automate insights from all your customer communications
There's no better way to get to know your customer than through their own communications with your brand. Gain a strategic advantage and a thorough understanding of your customer's full journey with a complete suite of conversation intelligence tools and features. Measure customer sentiment, automatically identify and score qualified conversations, and give strategists everything they need to knock their campaigns out of the park.
Use conversation analytics to:
• Build your ideal customer profile • Optimize your sales and customer service processes • Maximize your resources to focus on quality conversations • Identify trends and customer sentiment in real-time
CallFinder speech analytics CallFinder® is a leading provider of cloud-based SaaS speech analytics, automated call scoring, and speech-to-text transcription technology with sentiment analysis. Our easy-to-use solution is designed to help businesses and contact centers automate quality monitoring to improve agent performance and provide a superior customer experience.
With CallFinder, you get…
100% visibility into agent-customer interactions 100% monitoring of interactions, up from only 5-10% Scalability of QA reviews with the same size QA team CallFinder isn’t just your average speech analytics provider. When you work with us, you get unparalleled, continuous support through our MyAnalyst managed client servic... (read more)CallFinder® is a leading provider of cloud-based SaaS speech analytics, automated call scoring, and speech-to-text transcription technology with sentiment analysis. Our easy-to-use solution is designed to help businesses and contact centers automate quality monitoring to improve agent performance and provide a superior customer experience.
With CallFinder, you get…
100% visibility into agent-customer interactions 100% monitoring of interactions, up from only 5-10% Scalability of QA reviews with the same size QA team CallFinder isn’t just your average speech analytics provider. When you work with us, you get unparalleled, continuous support through our MyAnalyst managed client services with tailored, one-on-one training and guidance. Our analysts assist in transforming your manual Quality Monitoring processes into automatically delivered scorecards, transcripts, and reports that measure key business metrics to help you manage your business and contact center operations.
CCube for Business Intelligence CCube by Comsys is a business intelligence application, developed for enterprise contact centers. It delivers powerful, and dynamic reporting that enable managers to gain insight into their business. CCube is natively compatible with Aspect Unified IP and Cisco Unified Contact Center (UCCE/UCCX) platforms 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... (read more)CCube by Comsys is a business intelligence application, developed for enterprise contact centers. It delivers powerful, and dynamic reporting that enable managers to gain insight into their business. CCube is natively compatible with Aspect Unified IP and Cisco Unified Contact Center (UCCE/UCCX) platforms 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.
CROSSCRM.CX - CRM Dataviz Module CROSS-CRM manages daily interconnection with your CRM tools to centralize data and analyse CX on all channels, and is able to provide deep analytics insights.
All the Kpi’S are here for precise control of your Customer Relationship : Interactions - Quality - Satisfaction - Campains forecast MyClient
Filters, Data Extraction, Custom Views, dates sheets, email subscriptions, xls Extracts, images, pdf
PLUS ! Automated extracts for integration to third party applications.
Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better.
Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better.
Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer.
Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation.
The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated.
As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation.
DialogAnalytics™ Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more.
AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away.
With DialogAnalytics, you can get a... (read more)Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more.
AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away.
With DialogAnalytics, you can get all the pre-call data on the caller and the marketing interaction that drove the call. This helps inform your call routing, the conversations your agents have with customers, and, with AI, your marketing team can analyze conversations to help them take the best actions to drive better quality sales calls to the call center.
eGain Analytics eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively.
1. Operational Analytics™ empowers the business to measure and manage the call center directly and without IT involvement. 2. Knowledge Analytics™ provides insight for eGain’s knowledge and AI applications. 3. Digital Analytics™ measures contact center performance within eGain’s digital channel applications. 4. Journey Analytics™ captures customer behavior on the website—identify the churn points and cre... (read more)eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively.
1. Operational Analytics™ empowers the business to measure and manage the call center directly and without IT involvement. 2. Knowledge Analytics™ provides insight for eGain’s knowledge and AI applications. 3. Digital Analytics™ measures contact center performance within eGain’s digital channel applications. 4. Journey Analytics™ captures customer behavior on the website—identify the churn points and create a customer experience that will drive up sales and reduce contacts.
All this capability is delivered in a solution that’s easy to deploy, manage, and optimize. Built to work with the award-winning eGain Customer Engagement Hub™, as well as leading Call Center technologies such as Cisco UCCE and Avaya CMS, eGain Analytics provides true omnichannel management.
ethosAnalytics ethosAnalytics leverages data to provide business intelligence to enhance the customer experience and beyond. The analytics dashboards are customized based on client needs. ethosAnalytics enables data-driven decisions in seconds or minutes - not days or weeks.
Contact center Analytics and Metrics Lieber & Associates provides services to develop, interpret, and improve contact center metrics and analytics. The firm's experience spans forecasting, customer service, order-taking, lead-qualification, sales, segmentation, media-source-tracking, and testing design. L&A's president pioneered segmentation for telephone scripts and the tri-level service level metric. He brings broad analytics experience to contact centers.
Noble IQ Turn business insights into actionable intelligence. Noble’s IQsolutions provide you with rich and robust customer data that can transform your business. Automate decision making and campaign management and refine the quality of interactions with precision and efficiency. We have developed proprietary and patented tools to help you make sense of data on your current operations and then help you make strategic decisions to improve performance and efficiency. Identify who your best customers and prospects are and the ideal methods to reach them. Understand what types of campaigns work best for your business and how to optimize underperforming campaigns. And nake real-time decisions rather than looking back to see what went wrong.
SIP-Trunk Demarc Monitor Analyzes SIP signalling and RTP audio stream of every call passing through the network demarcation point. Provide a real time 24/7/365 network baseline database that contains the IP bandwidth, call traffic of up to 128 voice groups, Call Detail Record (CDR), call blockage and MOS voice quality. All information are displayed in SIP-Trunk dashboards and are used in many applications, such as Telco collaboration, UC/CC analytics, Work Force Optimization (WFO) and caller identification.
QPC Live QPC provides realtime unstructured and structured data analytics solutions and services to contact centres globally. We provide a complete end-to-end customer integrated offering powered by a Multichannel Intelligence Gateway which collects and inter-relates all customer interactions, from each and every customer contact across an entire contact centre ecosystem, all in real-time. We also provide solutions for conversational and interaction analytics with solutions from our specialist portfolio.
ActuCall Imagine for a moment that you are a call center manager responsible for generating revenue through signing new customers or up-selling to existing ones. Imagine that your KPI is telling you you have an abandonment rate of 5% and someone comes along and says "No, your abandonment rate or dropped call rate is 13%." .." How do I know? AcutuCall VoIP software application can show you the dropped call data including, originating number and whether it was a network or equipment failure." Now imagine you can see your calls in progress on a mobile app, take your dashboard where ever you go! "What is a lost call worth to you?"
15th annual Best Practice Conference - this is the contact center world's most highly rated event - a whopping 100% of delegates say they would recommend it!
100's of best practice tips and ideas from contact center professionals Read More...
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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.
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