In 1991 - US won the Gulf war, Paul Strassman Author and Chief Information Officer at Pentagon shared the lesson from Gulf War was that the country with the best software will win the war.
Same is the case with a company.
A company usually spends about 2-10% of their revenue on IT initiatives, the successful companies spend this allocation in increasing operational productivity while the other ones spend on management productivity
Every company has 2 things
Customer
A way for customers to contact the company
A contact center is a business division within an organisation that manages customer interactions. Unlike a call center, which receives requests only by telephone, the contact center handles inbound and outbound customer communication over multiple channels such as telephone, web, chat, email, messaging apps, social media, text, fax, and traditional mail. Contact centers use various types of advanced technology to help resolve customer issues quickly, to track customer engagements, and to capture interaction and performance data. Contact centers are usually operated either by an internal department or outsourced to a third party provider.
After a year of sweeping changes, it’s never been more important for contact centers to understand how global trends are affecting both customer behaviours and their expectations.
Statistics from the last 18 months are rife with signs that point toward further transformation in the contact center industry.
In 2021, pandemic-related challenges continued to fuel call volume spikes and customer frustrations. Workforce shortages made it harder than ever for contact centers to hire, train, and retain talent. And emerging technologies like conversational AI have accelerated digitisation and changed what consumers expect from automated self-service.
91% of consumers reported they have experienced poor customer service in the last six months.
Replicant 2021 Survey
76% of customers are calling on the phone when contacting customer service.
CFI Group
The 2020 Statista Report states that 87% of global organizations believe that AI will give them a competitive advantage. Call centers and contact centers will continue using AI for the automation of repetitive tasks related to customer service.
But before we delve into AI, we need to understand the reality of contact centers
People
Blue collar work: The workers are blue collar workers and not high skilled workers, it is a game of volume and large manpower to handle large
Maturity of the young generation workforce: The workforce is young 20-26 years of age who are majorly executing and connecting with customers, this lot is not mature in terms of skills and age to lead the customer to solution and requires a lot of assistant through L&D and Technology
Language skill based job: Many jobs in contact centers are based on language and communication skills.
Communication gaps: There is a communication gap in making things run over a call, guiding the users through the same.
Deep Rooted Communication - how do you gauge the communication ability of the workforce
Hiring of people based on communication and skill sets
Attrition of people and understanding why it happens
Absenteeism and business continuity.
Infrastructure
Investments go towards security - cameras,
Leadership is immature
Operations
Investments in security
Immature Leadership
First Call Resolution
Cost ReductionEfficiency improvement in the metrics
Business Challenges
How do we reduce operational cost by keeping the people and infrastructure limitations in mind and meeting the SLAs?
How to get the first call resolution to resolve a particular issue?
What are contact centers doing about this?
Solutions
To increase operational efficiency solutions are to be data and analytics driven
Benefits of Big Data Analytics in Customer Service (
mean conversations are no longer a black box. Customers who fully leveraged contact center data in 2021 made better decisions, were more productive, and are set up for greater success in the future.
55% of call centers spend 6-12 weeks training and onboarding new agents. (
As agent churn increased in tandem with hiring needs, training and onboarding became an unignorable obstacle for every contact center. The time, money, and resources spent onboarding new agents can only be avoided with technology like conversational AI – which only needs to be trained once and improves automatically over time.
Want to print your doc? This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
