How voice data empowers agents to help customers.
Contact Centers
Making the Modern Contact Center
The market shift to a cloud-based contact center, also known as contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS), is still growing even with a post COVID-19 pandemic economic slowdown.
While the CCaaS market enjoyed a rapid growth spike of 61% in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Omdia’s 2023 Trends to Watch: Contact Centers report, the market did not cool off completely. In fact, it is still growing at a year-over-year rate of over 16%, reports Omdia’s 2022 SIP Trunking Market study.
Even with the latest devices and networks, voice is still the preferred method of communications into contact centers. However, voice communications still present challenges to contact centers’ architecture.
Contact Center Challenges
Companies are beginning to recognize the impacts high-quality interactions may have on their bottom lines. However, these are often limited by a choice in architecture that affects how much control contact centers have over their networks.
- Complex communications. Voice infrastructure is costly and hard to integrate whether on-premise or in the cloud. The contact center infrastructure often requires network upgrades and application maintenance.
- As companies merge, and newer technologies are integrated, contact center solutions become incompatible with each other, often adding manual processes on the centers’ agents. Proprietary, siloed, and customized contact center solutions are often roadblocks for modernizing contact centers.
- Security. The Robinhood ransomware attack began with a contact center phone call and ultimately compromised the personal data of more than seven million customers.
- This is just one example of the many ransomware attacks that began with a single voice call into a contact center. This increased focus by hackers on contact centers is rising. Voice networks are a popular path of least resistance for bad actors.
- Network intelligence. The Omdia 2023 Trends to Watch: Contact Centers reported 33% of contact centers recognize they lack network resources and plan to add management tools to improve voice, video, and network performance. 57% of contact centers plan to increase their investments in intelligent 5G guided agent assistance.
- Disjointed on-premise multi-vendor contact center solutions are costly and complex to manage. Every vendor has their own feature set and management interfaces.
Introducing enhancements requires integrating different systems, implementing common policies and troubleshooting problems, which are all fraught with challenges. And to make matters worse, many companies rely on systems designed to support office workers and desktop phones, which are becoming less common and less relevant across the industry.
A Blueprint for Customer Engagement
Connecting Cloud Communications
In order to overcome these challenges, contact centers need a strategically designed approach. A good design for contact centers reduces the complexity through cloud architecture, provides intelligent insight into contact center operations, and protects the voice networks from interactive intrusions.
An example of this is CCaaS, which is a cloud-based customer experience solution that allows companies to utilize a contact center provider’s software without the overhead of on-premise IT support.
With CCaaS, businesses purchase only the technology they need to run a contact center, reducing the overall cost. CCaaS offers scalable, flexible architecture to provide enterprise support with most of the communications infrastructure in the cloud.
In selecting a cloud provider, contact centers should also ensure that a vendor pre-tests, integrates, and is certified with all other contact center vendors in use.
As environmental factors such as climate change threaten on-premise data centers, moving the data and processing to a secure and reliable cloud architecture ensures business continuity.
But while migrating to a CCaaS architecture may be the best option for a company in the long-term, the short-term integration of CCaaS to their existing network is complex and not straightforward.
Contact centers often take advantage of a variety of cloud communications and collaboration services that are called unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS). There are several contact center services that utilize network functionality through communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS).
However, CCaaS deployments or upgrades may take longer than expected or cost more if the interfaces between CCaaS and CPaaS, or CCaaS and UCaaS are untested. In the following visual example, a contact center may have to integrate between the on-premise equipment at the bottom, to the CCaaS providers on the left cloud, to the UCaaS providers at top, and the CPaaS providers on the right cloud.
In selecting a cloud provider, contact centers should also ensure that a vendor pre-tests, integrates, and is certified with all other contact center vendors in use.
As companies evaluate the best solution for their specific needs in order to provide frictionless digital transformation, they need to ensure they create a seamless integration between all the communications services a contact center employs.
But once a cloud architecture is in place, it provides contact centers with the ability to swap out legacy platforms or make updates with minimal disruption.
Moving to a cloud architecture reduces the pain of network management while simultaneously offering unlimited scale as contact center capacity increases. It also provides a better migration path where individual network components are strategically moved to the cloud or left on-prem for a cloud-to-ground, or hybrid cloud processing.
As well, contact centers may decommission outdated and underused systems over time to save on contracts at the same time delivering newer capabilities by rapidly deploying UCaaS or CPaaS services.
In the Metrigy 2023 Future of Contact Center report, while the majority of companies have moved to the cloud, 41.5% are using an on-premise solution. Hybrid contact centers are when a portion of the contact center solution in on-premise and another portion is in the cloud.
A hybrid contact center benefits companies going through a corporate merger or acquisition (M&A). An M&A often leaves companies with supporting two or more contact centers.
Instead of force-fitting the hardware and software into one contact center solution, a migration to a CCaaS solution makes the transition easier with less disruption of service.
Leveraging cloud-based technology reduces cost and has the potential to improve productivity while increasing customer satisfaction.
Because of the rapidly changing landscape in communications services and capabilities, it’s essential that any cloud solution be carrier or solution agnostic: what we refer to as a “Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC)” approach. Interoperability with any vendor enables the contact center control over services and networks that is best for their business.
Securing the Contact Center Perimeter
Connecting to a carrier of choice and to an on-premise solution requires a readjustment to secure the enterprise communications perimeter.
Because contact centers are an open, friendly environment for customer interaction, they are often a primary target for social engineering. Social engineering refers to any voice call aimed at a contact center agent attempting to reveal specific information or to perform a specific action for illegitimate reasons.
The burden of screening social engineering and authenticating a call is placed on the contact center agents. Unfortunately, they spend most of their time authenticating whether a call is trustworthy. Often, an agent does not have the time to do a lengthy authentication and several social engineering calls penetrate a company’s security.
Every call going into or out of a contact center contains metadata which includes information of where the call originated, the time, and destination.
While the receipt of a call’s metadata at a specific location may not provide much useful information locally, collecting and correlating the metadata for all calls going in or out provides far more information for accurate security measures.
The call’s metadata may be used to:
- Automatically screen fraudulent/nuisance calls in real-time.
- Calculate the call risk based on external data or network modeling of calls.
- Route the call to specific agents to optimize operations.
- Provide automatic updates to customers’ data.
Highly secure, real-time call validation is rapidly becoming “table stakes” for every contact center in order to protect against fraud and safeguard customer data without undermining the customer experience (CX).
Advance Intelligent Network Management
In a multi-vendor, move-to-the-cloud industry, contact centers must rely on advanced intelligent network management to provide a convenient, seamless CX, with secure cost-effective deployments.
It is important for companies to invest in solutions that deliver automated call routing capabilities, extensive network insights, and advanced protection while connecting multiple vendors into a hybrid cloud environment.
Design for Success
For the modern contact center, it is important for companies to invest in solutions that will solve challenges that may arise.
Leveraging cloud-based technology reduces cost and has the potential to improve productivity while increasing customer satisfaction. However, good customer engagement and customer satisfaction – even with voice communication – does not happen by accident; it must be a core strategy of the company and have a well-defined design.
A well-designed contact center provides intelligent resources for greater insight through analytics. Implementing hybrid cloud solutions can help facilitate optimal security with the necessary intelligence to succeed.
Loyalty Starts with Strong CX
Although inflation has shown signs of slowing down, consumers are still making careful purchasing decisions. And, as we go into 2024, these trends are expected to continue, with consumers focusing their spending more heavily on necessities rather than on discretionary purchases.
Indeed, if prices for basic staples such as food and housing continue to fluctuate, it’s likely that many of the critical spending levers that boost the economy will remain flat. From the fall holidays to Black Friday/Cyber Monday, consumers may opt out: further depressing the economy.
…the proliferation of speech and data analytics can more quickly surface unhappy customer behaviors…
This trend means that brands must prioritize retail and eCommerce customer experience (CX) to stand out from the competition and maintain customer loyalty. However, consumers have strong preferences for their interactions with brands, and just one negative experience can result in lost customers.
Many brands recognize that their contact center agents are sometimes not adequately equipped to best meet these ever-evolving preferences. This realization is often tied to poor CX reports, low NPS scores, or other missed metrics.
Today, the proliferation of speech and data analytics can more quickly surface unhappy customer behaviors or even frustrated agent behaviors, but fixing the root cause is more difficult.
Here, we’ll explore the latest consumer preferences for brand engagement. And how brands can leverage technology to empower contact center agents with the right tools for successful customer interactions all the time.
Purchase Channel Preferences
The most recent Global Customer Engagement Report (GCER) from Vonage surveyed more than 4,600 consumers in North America, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia. It identified consumer communication preferences with friends and family, as well as businesses and service providers.
While 45% of respondents indicated they prefer making in-store purchases, the gap between it and alternatives is tightening, with 39% favoring eCommerce, followed closely by phone (38%) and email (36%).
Considering that we have become accustomed to a digital-first world, especially over the last three years, these results and others from the survey might come as a surprise.
So many of our interactions now happen virtually: work, school, play, and everything in between. But Vonage research shows consumers still prefer making more traditional phone calls when questions and concerns arise.
- More than half of consumers are willing to call businesses and service providers with questions while shopping (54%).
- An even higher percentage of consumers (63%) are willing to make contact via phone if they encounter any purchase problems.
Digital shopping is undoubtedly here to stay, but it’s clear customers still value the benefits of voice calls.
We’ve seen that customer preferences are ever-changing, and it’s been a particularly strong trend in recent years with rapid digital transformation. For example, a 2022 Consumer Pulse Survey by McKinsey found that three-quarters of U.S. consumers are doing omnichannel shopping, both in-store and online.
Brands, then, will want to enable contact center agents with omnichannel communications tools. So as to ensure the online shopping experience meets the same level of personalization and superior CX as that of in-store shopping.
Customer Expectations and Common Frustrations
Consumers have strong preferences for interactions with brands. And if those expectations aren’t met due to contact center staffing or process issues, they can be left frustrated.
Brands must evaluate their communications tools to ensure that agents are adequately equipped to meet customer needs throughout the purchasing process. And they will need to act quickly. As noted in the GCER, 48% of consumers are likely to leave or switch businesses after just one or two frustrating experiences.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t provide much leeway to be unprepared for customer interactions. Respondents indicated two of the most common extremely or very frustrating experiences are long wait times to speak to an agent (63%) and having to describe issues to multiple agents multiple times (61%).
Customers expect a brand to have agents available to answer questions and help with issues around the clock. Businesses that strive to offer outstanding CXs have recognized they must meet their consumers wherever and whenever they are, across all devices, channels, and even locations and times.
To meet this mandate, brands have created and employed bespoke best-of-breed solutions from different vendors that string together multiple communication platforms. They are aimed at solving baseline customer needs.
But this leaves CX teams to suffer the consequences. Brands may lose track of the customer with fractured data and inconsistent integrations when they cannot offer a true omnichannel choice to the customer. Sometimes vendors decide to sunset solutions and/or go out of business: or are acquired and the new owners phase their products out, leaving brands to scramble.
Equipping contact center agents with the tools that can track customer interactions throughout a session and incorporate previous customer data will be best positioned to meet customer needs.
Businesses that strive to offer outstanding CXs have recognized they must meet their consumers wherever and whenever they are…
To do this, brands will have to embrace all-in-one solutions for their total business communication needs. Thereby swinging the pendulum back in favor of consolidated communication platforms and best-in-suite offerings.
The Path Forward
To meet these evolving expectations like customer service on each consumer’s preferred channel, instant access, and more streamlined communications, companies have had to think beyond solutions. And consider how they can deliver the needs of customers, employees, and agents: all from a single platform.
Technologies like unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) enable contact center agents to collaborate with each other from anywhere. They can make more meaningful connections with customers over any channel – voice, video, messaging, chat – and develop rich engagements, which increases the ability to resolve issues effectively the first time.
UCaaS, as defined by Gartner, “is a cloud-delivered unified communications model that supports six communications functions: enterprise telephony, meetings (audio/video/web conferencing), unified messaging, instant messaging and presence (personal and team), mobility, and communications-enabled business processes.”
Gartner notes that CCaaS “enables customer service organizations to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically in terms of both customer experience (CX) and employee experience.” [One that enables] a flexible business model across the four pillars of great customer service: 1) getting connected; 2) process orchestration; 3) knowledge and insight; and 4) resource management.
With a cloud-based contact center solution, agents can assist customers from anywhere, anytime, and conversations can move seamlessly between communications channels. Brands using a CCaaS solution would be wise to integrate them with their CRM solutions to gather the most up-to-date customer information to serve the customer quickly and effectively.
Today, communications APIs make it easier for brands to implement tools like chatbots or voice assist technology. They allow customers to leverage self-serve for quick requests and lighten the load for agents.
If a self-serve request cannot easily be resolved, customers can be quickly routed to the appropriate agent who will have all the information at their fingertips. Also, some contact center solutions have their own virtual assistants, for seamless configuration and data management, while retaining the great CX offered by intelligent self-service automations.
Ensuring Long-Term Success
Multiple factors are impacting contact center success today and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Key among them is staffing. Many brands in the middle of the market are struggling with employee retention and recruitment. As a result, they should consider embracing greater workforce flexibility and a gig economy approach while supporting agents in working from anywhere.
Meanwhile, as technology advances, Conversational AI (artificial intelligence) and Generative AI may be a huge boon for brands looking to elevate and advance communications with customers.
AI and natural language understanding (NLU)-based solutions will boost self-service. Brands can achieve lowered costs of offering high-quality service to customers while achieving improved outcomes.
Consumers find more satisfaction in connecting with brands through automation that enables them to resolve everyday issues effectively without long waits. While at the same time having ready access to highly skilled and available live agents who can focus on their more complex issues.
While technology has allowed and will continue to allow brands to make great strides in maintaining superior customer service, there is still room for improvement. By implementing the appropriate technologies to empower contact center agents and customers, brands can maintain customer share and strengthen loyalty.
Social(izing) the Experience
The success of a company’s contact center rests on whether the business invests to empower its agents with the tools and support they need.
However, many large brands struggle to retain agents, which negatively impacts the company’s overarching customer and revenue strategy and adds costs. According to research by Cresta, contact centers traditionally experience an average of 30%-45% agent churn annually, a number that reached as high as 80% in some sectors since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Agents may leave for any number of reasons, and it is critical for businesses to care for, develop, and engage their employees to retain them. A Ferry Hay Group study cited by Oak Engage found that companies with engaged employees have 98% greater customer satisfaction and 50% higher customer loyalty than those with disengaged employees.
How can you set your customers up for success if you don’t do the same for your agents? The customer and employee experiences are closely intertwined, and customer success stems from hiring the right people and giving them the training, tools, and processes they need to do their jobs well.
Understand and Improve the Customer/Employee Experience
What steps do you need to take to begin providing the cascading benefits of contact center agent success to your customers?
First, rethink your view of customer satisfaction and how you’re determining success. Measuring short-term financial wins doesn’t always have the same foundational considerations as customer loyalty and brand awareness.
How can you set your customers up for success if you don’t do the same for your agents?
Second, with this in mind, reevaluate how you analyze employee performance and customer satisfaction beyond narrow outcomes like Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), cost per call (CPC), and average handle time (AHT).
Statistics can be helpful but only tell part of the story. Aligning your teams with clear expectations ensures everyone drives toward agreed-upon goals rather than simply checking boxes. Bringing a human-centric, collaborative focus to your organization can make your company more personal and profitable.
In 2022, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) measured the success of companies via financial and employee data using metrics such as employee longevity, full-time/part-time status, internal rotations, and skill level. The HBR determined that if an average store moved from the bottom 25% to the top 25% in every metric, each employee would generate more sales per hour, up to $87 from $57.
Getting a granular understanding of the employee/agent and customer experience provides a guide to what is happening in a company and how to improve those experiences.
I like to call this getting to “Inner Earth.” That means joining a support call and seeing what happens if someone has an issue can reveal more context behind the metrics. It also helps you identify efficiencies and areas for improvement.
Rather than dictating to agents that they need to increase their numbers, you can provide anecdotal recommendations on serving customers better. Then, you can pair people with tasks that align with their strengths, enhancing employees’ satisfaction and performance within their roles, and ultimately creating a more positive customer experience (CX).
Despite the proliferation of contact center automation and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, no technology will completely replace a human’s passion and empathy. Agents are the heart of customer service. Therefore, prioritizing your employees’ success and well-being will directly translate into how they handle customer issues.
Beyond upskilling agents to help them feel more confident in their careers, consider offering mental health resources and encouraging breaks to walk or meditate to improve overall wellness, as personal health is one of the key reasons for agent churn.
Migrate Conversations Away From the Phone
The crux of the agent experience resides in their customer interactions. Phone calls also still comprise the bulk of their daily work.
These calls are inherently stressful. No one contacts an organization when everything is going well. But there are opportunities to improve the experience for both the employee and the customer by moving away from the phone to utilizing digital channels.
Phone calls are an essential and sometimes necessary part of contact centers, but these conversations can take place using other means, saving agent time and energy for more complicated situations. So, make it clear on your various platforms what support options are available.
…social media…has some of the greatest potential to improve the customer and employee experience.
Statista shows 58% of customers prefer resolving customer service issues through digital channels like social media and email (more about social later on). According to Gartner, service leaders report that as much as 40% of today’s live call volume could be resolved in self-service channels.
Brands should aim to offer multiple avenues for contact, including self-service options, to deliver better results for customers, agents, and the company’s bottom line. The key to successful digital customer engagement is meeting your customers where they are, without making them repeat too much information.
Branded communities are a great way to divert significant call volume to an easily navigable and controlled platform, and to create user-generated answers and reviews that help your customers self-serve for issues and concerns.
These platforms enable customers to fulfill all of their needs in one place. They can:
- Find multiple answers within a community and connect with others in similar situations.
- Easily offer feedback and chat directly with the brand, revealing recurring issues that can be solved at their source.
Because of the user experience and transparency, a strong community delivers an authentic bond between brand and customer, bolstering “social proof” and trust. Social proof purports that people’s actions and decisions are influenced by those around them.
Other self-service tools like chatbots can lighten the workload for agents. Rather than having an agent answer multiple easy questions — like what time a flight leaves or how long a deal runs for — a chatbot can handle those queries with quick answers and share resources for additional information.
This helps triage issues, allowing agents to dedicate live chats or phone calls to more complex solutions that often require two-way dialogs with customers.
Being Social
Despite recent controversies surrounding API access of platforms, social media still has some of the greatest potential to improve the customer and employee experience.
Across the world, 54% of people use social media for an average of two and a half hours every day, according to Statista. A portion of that time is used to communicate with brands, whether offering a shoutout to a favorite company, asking a question about a new product or service, or firing off a complaint.
Other channels like phone calls also don’t offer as many chances for social proof, which drives customer acquisition. Even if you must migrate a conversation to a separate forum, responding to a customer on social media channels can illustrate your commitment to addressing their issues.
With its immense popularity and usage, social media is a critical communication channel for customers. Brands need to offer quick and seamless interactions to deliver fulfilling digital engagement experiences.
Key Challenges for Agents in Using Social Channels
Consumers have lofty expectations for quick responses on social media. Agents must effectively handle and prioritize the high volume of customer inquiries, comments, and complaints in real-time to produce high-quality customer service.
Additionally, with the numerous social channels available, customers can start conversations with a company on one platform and then continue them on another. They expect the brand to be aware of their previous interactions; agents must be able to pick up the conversations where they left off. Brands that are siloed and lack internal continuity will struggle to satisfy this desire.
…social media is a critical communication channel…[and] brands need to offer quick and seamless interactions to deliver fulfilling digital engagement experiences.
This expectation of a unified, consistent experience also includes the brand’s voice and personality. All agents need to be trained on brand guidelines and values to maintain a cohesive brand image across channels and platforms.
This challenge becomes even more complex as different platforms may call for unique tones and styles. For example, brands often use more professional language on LinkedIn versus being more casual and friendly on X (Twitter). It’s important to accommodate these nuances while adhering to the overarching brand values.
While many customers prefer communication on social media over phone calls, this medium diminishes important qualities like tone of voice. Agents must be deliberate and impactful with their written language to meaningfully convey the compassion and empathy that are integral to customer service.
It’s essential to properly equip your agents with the resources they need to meet customer expectations with personalized and streamlined results.
Tips for Better Social Channel Communication
Offer supportive tools for your agents. Predictive text responses, basic automation rules, and AI-powered tagging help measure social conversation volume, quality, and resolution rates based on the customer’s intent, even if they’re not using specific keywords. This also promotes better internal alignment across multiple teams and channels.
Employ social listening, which enables proactive customer service by identifying where your brand appears across all channels and communities. Manage your brand reputation and engage with users outside of their explicitly flagged issues to boost brand love, deliver support, and mitigate risk.
In addition to responding in a personable and timely fashion across channels, don’t forget about your super-users. These brand advocates are already singing your praises and dishing out social proof, so ensure you acknowledge and amplify their voices.
Prepare your agents by fostering collaboration within and between business units (BUs). If Marketing releases a new product or service, ensure customer care teams can anticipate customer needs and are staffed appropriately. If they know what other BUs are doing, they can communicate permitted and relevant points on social channels.
It’s critical to have an omnichannel contact center solution and view, such as from a unified dashboard, or to have a robust CRM tool with thorough notes so agents can quickly scan previous conversations and be more efficient in future interactions.
Adding multiple, separated communication channels and applications – including social – can dilute customer service if they are disjointed or poorly monitored. Customers shouldn’t have to repeat themselves, and brands that demonstrate they understand them, and their issues, will earn long-term loyalty.
This omnichannel view is critical when migrating conversations to customers’ preferred channels so the discussion can continue seamlessly to benefit both the agent and the customer.
Conclusion: Why Social Is Essential for Omnichannel Support
Empowering contact centers to provide customer service through social media is essential for meeting customers where they are. No channel is a one-size-fits-all solution, but training agents on how to enrich and prioritize different touchpoints like social, chatbots, live chat, and brand-owned communities is critical for long-term customer loyalty and satisfaction.
According to Khoros research, 83% of consumers are more loyal to brands that resolve and respond to their complaints. Contact centers that effectively care for customers, thoughtfully balance multiple support avenues, and promote a personalized, unified brand experience will succeed in the tumultuous digital engagement landscape.
Reimagining the Contact Center
The last 10 years have revolutionized the way we do everything. Innovative brands from Tesla to Amazon have leveraged technology to create new realities for entire industries.
But can you describe a recent exceptional experience with a contact center? Many companies have not changed the way they serve customers in over 10 to 15 years. The technological revolution has missed contact centers, and as consumers, we deserve more.
Time is our most precious gift, and we are done wasting time on hold – pressing one for sales, two for service, yelling “representative” – only to be connected to someone who cannot help, then passed to another agent, and asked to start again.
I want you to imagine for a moment stepping into an Apple or Verizon store. You are greeted by someone; you explain why you are there. Then you are approached again with “How can I help you?” This continues until you’re frustrated and walk out.
We do not tolerate 50 first dates for our in-person shopping experiences. But this is how most of our digital customer service experiences go.
Outdated Siloed Technology = Customer Frustration
Technology has radically changed how consumers interact with brands. Consumer expectations have also changed. Yet the contact center experience remains largely unchanged because it is based on old, outdated, and siloed technology.
Siloed technology creates siloed customer-facing teams. Customer service is disconnected from sales and marketing. Each function is tasked with interacting with customers, but no one shares the same customer data. The result is a disjointed engagement with customers leading to frustration and negative business impact.
Technology is not meant to be siloed. It is meant to be connected and to connect those who use it and those it serves.
…the best CXs are when products and services are performing as expected.
As consumers, we already use technology to connect all areas of our work and personal lives. And connected technologies can bring the same value to modernizing the contact center experience. Not just for customers but also for the agents who help them.
Connected technology creates a connected team who can now work together to solve a customer complaint, while possibly selling them something new, or capturing feedback that may improve a product feature. As a result, agent productivity can be dramatically improved, while the cost to serve can be dramatically reduced.
Four Steps To Creating the Contact Center of the Future
Companies must build a contact center that is designed to provide personalized service and support to every customer, on any channel, at any time. With the technology available today, brands can fundamentally rethink the contact center experience for the consumer and the customer service agent by following four key steps.
1. Embrace a new mantra: “no silos.”
The first and most crucial step for building the contact center of the future is to remember: no silos.
Decades ago, the first contact center technology was created to manage a high volume of calls. Social media, messaging channels, review sites, and email did not yet exist, but many of the systems used for enterprise customer service today are built on this legacy technology.
Lacking the ability to seamlessly integrate modern channels or integrate across departments, customer service agents are forced into a silo. Disconnected teams + disconnected technology = a disappointing customer experience (CX).
Siloed teams and technology can only be solved with a unified approach to creating a contact center. This means that the contact center must be omnichannel. This is dramatically different from multichannel. If you provide customer service in email and you provide customer service on the phone and chat, that is multichannel.
With omnichannel customer service, customers easily switch between channels without any disruption in service. For example, when a customer engages a chatbot on a website and is then routed to a representative, the entirety of the conversation is at their fingertips.
If brands provide a true omnichannel experience, customers can interact in the way that is most convenient for them, and with no disruptions.
2. Harness the power of AI.
Modern customer service happens across dozens of channels and platforms. For enterprise brands working on a global scale, they deal with thousands of direct customer communications each day.
Combine this with the direct engagements consumers are having about your brand online via social media, review sites, etc. and you get a mountain of CX data that no human can capture, analyze, and act on.
The contact center of the future must have artificial intelligence (AI) at its core. A modern, AI-powered contact center will help in three ways.
First, AI can identify common issues or problems, not just in customer service but across the entire supply chain. I cannot stress enough how critical this is. Solve these common problems at the product or service level, and the need for service goes away.
After all, the best customer service is not needing any in the first place. The happiest, most satisfied customers are those who have no reason to call or contact you with a problem in the first place.
Second, AI-powered self-service tools will give customers better answers much more efficiently. Remember, customers don’t really want to call you.
Finally, AI enables better routing within your call center. With AI, customers can be routed on advanced criteria like behavioral traits of the agent, customer profile, or past conversational history to ensure the best outcome.
When a high-priority or complex issue needs to be escalated to a live agent, that agent is given context from past conversations, recommended remediation steps, and tools like Generative AI can develop better, more effective responses.
3. Move from a cost center to revenue center.
The third step to creating the contact center of the future is understanding that the contact center is not a complaint center.
It shouldn’t be the place where customers call to voice frustrations. Instead, the contact center of the future will be your revenue center. It will be an always-open, digital-first store where agents, salespeople, and marketers can seamlessly work together to better serve customers.
4. Treat the disease, not the symptom.
In the future, brands shouldn’t wait for a customer to call or leave a one-star review. They should proactively listen to online customer comments and questions to predict potential issues before they arise.
Remember, the best CXs are when products and services are performing as expected. Brands that truly listen to everything that is said to them, or about them, or their competition: are the ones that will proactively prevent customer service issues.
Designing With Customers in Mind
Contact centers must be designed with customers in mind. Remove silos, power customer service with AI, transform the contact center from a cost center to a revenue center, and offer proactive care.
By breaking down organizational barriers, using cutting-edge technology, focusing on revenue-generating opportunities, and anticipating customer needs, companies can build a connected customer-centric contact center that delivers human experiences at every touchpoint.
If you deeply care about your customers, it can be done. And perhaps you’ll soon be remembered for exceptional CXs.
Correct the Tech
IDing technology failures and by the right parties improve results.
Messaging the Improved Agent Experience
Customers demand more from customer support than ever before, and many call centers have struggled to answer the call.
With turnover rates increasing, call centers have had to make do with fewer employees, and wait times increased as a result.
But voice interactions are only one piece of the customer experience (CX) puzzle. Most businesses also offer customer support through digital channels like email, online web chat, and social media.
Too often though, these channels operate in silos, leaving call center employees in the dark about previous customer interactions. This lack of continuity across channels frustrates customers and sets employees up for failure through this poor employee experience (EX).
To lighten the load on call center employees – while also improving CX – businesses need to try and centralize communication through their call centers. They can do this through mobile messaging technology.
Poor mental health among call center workers can grind productivity and business growth to a halt.
Mobile messaging enables call center employees to communicate with customers asynchronously on their mobile devices, freeing up time to give emotionally-charged customers the attention they need. With this tech in place, call center employees are involved with the customers from beginning to end without breaks in communication.
Employees’ Mental Health is Vitally Important
Call centers are notoriously high-stress environments. A Cornell University study found that 87% of call center employees reported high or very high stress levels on the job, and over 50% reported feeling emotionally drained from their work. Many call center employees deal with long hours, impatient customers, and low pay: conditions that can lead to burnout.
The past few years have only exacerbated these issues. Call centers were forced to handle more customers with fewer available employees, putting these employees under further mental strain. It’s no surprise that turnover rates jumped from 50% to 80% in 2021.
Poor mental health among call center workers can grind productivity and business growth to a halt. It goes without saying that burned-out employees are unable to give customers the emotional support they’re looking for.
Instead, these employees give customers a subpar experience and eventually begin to look elsewhere for employment. This leaves call center leaders scrambling to hire and onboard new employees while maintaining quality service: a task many leaders have neither the time nor resources to pull off.
Omnichannel Customer Support Multiplies Headaches
Call center employees don’t need any more stress on the job, but as the number of digital customer support channels increases, additional stress is inevitable.
Yet most businesses understand that meeting customer expectations requires an omnichannel approach. Servicing customers over the phone isn’t enough: 88% of millennial customers prefer to text instead of talking.
But just because many businesses offer these alternative customer support channels doesn’t mean they’re well executed. Disconnected digital channels worsen call center experiences: both for the customer and the employee.
For example, a customer may communicate with a social media service rep through Instagram and get redirected to a customer service hotline. After an hour-long wait, the customer’s call center rep answers the phone with no insight into their problem or the conversation that happened on social.
The customer then has to start over from scratch and grows increasingly annoyed with the call center rep. Finally, they take out their frustrations on the rep, who grows increasingly dissatisfied with the customer (and their job). It’s a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle of a negative CX powering a negative EX.
As you can see, investments in digital channels often overcomplicate the user experience instead of simplifying it. But this comes at the expense of call center employees’ mental health and the customer’s relationship with the brand.
Fortunately, there’s a way to break the cycle. By investing in mobile messaging technology, call centers can offer customers a smoother cross-channel experience and better prepare call center employees. Resulting in improved mental health and long-term retention.
How Mobile Messaging Improves the EX
Mobile messaging enables call center employees to reach customers directly on their mobile devices. With this capability, employees gain end-to-end visibility into a customer’s problem and can save time by communicating with them asynchronously.
From a customer service perspective, mobile messaging allows organizations to streamline their communication and meet customers where they already are instead of struggling to connect siloed email and social media channels. 71% of millennials use chat apps daily, and as the number of digital natives increases, chat messaging will also grow in popularity.
Here are two main advantages of mobile messaging that your call center can benefit from:
1. A better experience and greater efficiency for call center workers.
Centering chat in your customer service strategy is a tremendous lift off your call center employees’ backs and improves their EX: by saving them time and frustration. With expanded chat capabilities, call center workers can assist more customers in less time.
For example, let’s say an employee has to deal with 10 customers per hour. Without chat capabilities, this employee must assist each customer over the phone.
Some of these customers have simple questions that are already answered on the company’s website, others have complicated questions that need troubleshooting. And some have already gone through other digital channels and are contacting the call center as a last-ditch effort.
Now, let’s insert mobile messaging into the mix. By communicating with each of these 10 customers via their mobile phones, the employee gains a comprehensive view into the urgency and complexity of each customer’s problem: and can prioritize work accordingly.
For customers with simpler problems, the employee can save time by keeping communication asynchronous through text. They can then choose to elevate communication from text to a phone call if a problem requires a more nuanced conversation.
With this technology in place, your employees gain greater control over their workloads and assist customers from beginning to end rather than jumping in halfway through the process. The end result is less strain on employees’ mental health and more satisfied customers.
2. A smoother experience for customers.
From a customer’s perspective, mobile messaging eliminates much of the confusion that comes from dealing with disconnected customer service offerings.
Customers can work with a single representative instead of repeating themselves across different channels. 86% of customers are willing to leave a brand they love after two or three poor customer service experiences, according to Emplifi. Providing flexible, high-quality customer support experiences from the start is key to building brand loyalty.
Flexibility in customer support assistance is essential to providing quality service because a customer’s preferred method of communication is subject to change.
For example, a customer may typically avoid phone calls, but if they have an urgent problem, they’ll be more inclined to pick up the phone. Or if they’re occupied with work or family life during the day, they may opt for asynchronous help that allows them to multitask.
Your goal when implementing mobile messaging should be to make transitions between chat and over-the-phone assistance as smooth as possible. And remember, satisfied customers means satisfied employees.
Mobile messaging simplifies life for customers and employees by streamlining communication between the two.
To help make that happen your call center should look for a mobile messaging vendor that offers low-code integration options that allow you to design, test, and launch new chat capabilities without a ton of heavy lifting from IT.
This approach enables marketing leaders, who have a deeper knowledge of the company’s customer base, to lead these initiatives and ensure they align with overall business goals.
Mobile Messaging: The Answer to Modern Challenges
The relationship between employee mental health and CXs is front and center for call centers.
After all, call center employees bear the brunt of the frustrations customers feel when dealing with disconnected customer support channels.
To see employee mental health and retention improve, your call center needs to rethink its approach to customer service and invest in technology that creates better customer experiences.
This is where mobile messaging enters the picture. Mobile messaging simplifies life for customers and employees by streamlining communication between the two. Employees can service more customers in a shorter amount of time, and customers experience shorter wait times.
Ultimately, mobile messaging is an intuitive solution for modern call centers that are stretched thin, and it’s the key to providing a better CX that gives your employees more flexibility and higher job satisfaction.
Flying Through the Turbulence
The ability of contact centers to provide an excellent customer experience (CX) is being buffeted by two key winds of change.
- Challenges in attracting and retaining quality staff.
- Meeting the needs of the new generation of customers (Gen Z).
These issues impact the channels, most of which are increasingly hosted in the cloud, that customers use. To help provide guidance, we reached out to the thought leaders at several leading contact center solution suppliers.
They are:
- Laura Bassett, Vice President Product Marketing, NICE CXone
- Jono Luk, Vice President of Product Management, Webex by Cisco
- Alain Mowad, Director of Product Marketing at Talkdesk
- Jessica Smith, Head of CCaaS Product Marketing, 8×8
- Mike Szilagyi, General Manager, Product Management at Genesys
Q. There continues to be reports of contact center staffing shortages. Is this issue impacting the channels customers use? Are contact centers nudging customers even more to self-service? And if so, can they do this without alienating customers?
Laura Bassett:
Staffing shortages continue to permeate industries and organizations, but the contact center has been hit particularly hard in the last several years.
Self-service assistance is a natural next step to the automation boom that’s been gaining traction for years, one that feeds the demands of both organizations and their customers.
“While phone preference is slightly declining, brands must ensure that they cater to all of these channels, and not look to phase out more traditional lines of communication.”
—Laura Bassett
With increasing technological advancements in their daily lives, consumers are looking for speed and efficiency in the CX, many times preferring to handle issues themselves if given the proper tools. On the other hand, we’ve seen an expansion of customers preferring agent-assisted digital channels in the past few years, with the demand for social media channels and chat increasing.
While phone preference is slightly declining, brands must ensure that they cater to all of these channels, and not look to phase out more traditional lines of communication.
In this sense, self-service capabilities benefit the business as well, by keeping customers with simple needs out of the contact center, freeing up agents to spend more time with customers with more challenging issues and requests.
Jono Luk:
Yes, yes, and yes. Customers will use whichever method can get them faster and better answers. If the wait time to speak to an agent over the phone is too long, they might try email or chat.
Instead of embracing this choice, businesses may try to nudge their customers to use self-service by placing an IVR system or bot in front of the human agent.
Customers who prefer human interaction may have gotten the answer they wanted through this method, but felt the interaction was cold and unfriendly. Businesses may not know how powerful and effective their virtual agents are since traditional metrics often don’t offer visibility into those interactions.
Alain Mowad:
Yes, contact centers continue to face a skills shortage, despite the challenging economic environment. Increasing adoption of self-service and digital channels has helped them mitigate this challenge.
Self-service of a larger number of common use cases ensures that only the higher value complex interactions and interactions requiring human empathy are handled by a smaller pool of agents.
Digital channel adoption allows agent capacity to scale because each agent can handle multiple digital interactions simultaneously versus a single voice interaction. Contact centers are employing deflect-to-digital strategies to encourage voice customers to continue their conversations via digital channels such as live chat or WhatsApp.
An increasing reliance on self-service and digital channels for communication as a strategy to lower costs and improve efficiencies also has the added benefit of improving the CX. While this may seem counterintuitive, it actually isn’t.
“With Gen Zers and millennials now comprising the majority of the workforce, companies must adapt and change their customer service practices to focus on how they prefer to do business.” —Alain Mowad
Customers want a quick and effortless experience when dealing with the companies they do business with. Customers overwhelmingly opt to try self-service options first followed by a preference for asynchronous forms of communication that come with the use of digital channels.
Customers get what they need quicker and with a low amount of effort when they can serve themselves to get their inquiry resolved. The same is true for digital communications. In both cases, the effort to resolve an inquiry is significantly less than that spent on a voice call, and reduced customer effort is directly correlated with a better CX.
Jessica Smith:
When customers are frustrated by long wait times and poor or lengthy interactions with live agents, they want to turn to other options, like self-service.
However, self-service faces the risk of falling flat and alienating customers even further when businesses fail to deliver positive experiences that result in fast/easy resolutions: inevitably frustrating customers even more.
“With Gen Z, we expect to see an even greater pivot toward digital channel preferences, namely in social media platforms where they engage and interact with their preferred brands.”
—Jessica Smith
This is one of many reasons why it is increasingly important for companies to invest in advanced automation and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) to enhance current CX strategies in a way that matches and exceeds customer expectations around self-service.
Mike Szilagyi:
Contact center agent retention has historically been a challenge. Genesys research found that the average annual contact center turnover was 32%. Clearly this trend is unacceptable, and it’s a major challenge that businesses are working to face.
Fortunately, the research also found that organizations’ primary strategic priority for the next few years is improving employee experience with new technology. The goal is to implement technology that makes work easier and more rewarding for employees, often by implementing gamified KPIs, creating better user technology interfaces, and increasingly leveraging generative AI to reduce agent workloads.
The good news is that modern contact center technology is already doing some incredible things to support agents:
- Calls are being routed faster (and more correctly) than ever before.
- Agents are equipped with technology that can analyze calls in real-time, gauge customer sentiment and tone, and even prompt an agent on the best responses to give to a customer.
- Agents are increasingly able to solve customer queries more efficiently and accurately, allowing them to get through calls quicker, and customers to feel more satisfied with their service.
Q. There have been many conversations about Gen Z and their expectations. Do they use different inbound channels than preceding generations?
Laura Bassett:
Growing up in the age of advanced technology and smart devices, Gen Zers have higher expectations than most consumers when it comes to inbound channel variability.
Gen Zers live their life online, and specifically social media. Their standards for good customer service often rewards brands that will meet them where they are: making service easy, accessible, and as least disruptive to their daily lives as possible.
While the customer service call is not going anywhere, Gen Z is much more likely to use quicker, more modern channels including a variety of social media. This makes it even more critical for brands to invest in a wide array of channels so they’re where their customers want them to be, regardless of generation.
Jono Luk:
I think of Gen Z as both the “digital” and the “search engine generation.” They are digital because they have the ability to find answers using mobile apps, search engines, and websites faster than phone calls would likely take.
Gen Z is much more likely to rely on social channels, such as Facebook and Instagram Messenger, to find answers since they can do it on their own time. Millennials, on the other hand, largely use SMS text and email, though they may have the same fluency in “getting answers they need.”
Both generations feel more comfortable utilizing non-traditional digital channels than preceding generations, so businesses should offer multiple channel options for their customers.
Alain Mowad:
Gen Zers, much like millennials, are digitally native. They:
- Have grown up experiencing the “right now” convenience of interacting online and getting what they want quickly and effortlessly.
- Prefer self-service and expect that most of what they need can be addressed through self-service means, without the need to call or even chat.
- Prefer to communicate using asynchronous digital channels.
- Have grown accustomed to interacting with AI-powered bots.
- Are also more likely to switch brands when they are not satisfied with a particular brand’s quality or service.
With Gen Zers and millennials now comprising the majority of the workforce, companies must adapt and change their customer service practices to focus on how they prefer to do business.
This means increasing self-service options, and the availability of digital forms of communications, as well as investing in Conversational AI bots for voice and digital communications.
Jessica Smith:
With Gen Z, we expect to see an even greater pivot toward digital channel preferences, namely in social media platforms where they engage and interact with their preferred brands.
Studies have also shown that Gen Z expects even more speed, personalization, intuitive conversations, and even app-driven interactions from their customer service. The generation itself is flexible and agile, and they expect the same from their customer service experiences.
Mike Szilagyi:
Voice calls are clearly still the preferred channel, but this trend declines with each younger generation who tend to prefer asynchronous or unassisted interactions.
In particular, millennials and Gen Z have a stronger preference for digital channels, particularly messaging apps, chatbots, and social media. They also prefer to have service in their channels – like Instagram or WhatsApp – rather than traditional channels, like voice or email.
Interestingly, Genesys research also found that millennials and Gen Zers were generally more patient with frustrations on calls than Gen Xers or Baby Boomers.
However, millennials and Gen Zers were more likely to stop using a company after a negative service interaction. This is something CX leaders need to be thinking about, because in the long-term there is a significant risk in failing to appease younger customers: Gen Z is the largest generation on earth, and it will be essential to appeal to them.
Q. To connect the two issues, have, and do you expect Gen Z’s channels preferences to effect change on contact center staffing and training, and if so, how?
Jono Luk:
The transition of addressing challenges associated with attracting and retaining staff has been apparent for some time. With that, I expect that Gen Z’s preferences will continue to effect change in contact center staffing. Here’s why.
- 1. Changing how you “talk.” Engagement over a digital channel like in-app messaging or Apple Business Chat has a distinctive style and tone.
- The asynchronous and piecemeal nature of chat versus voice-based interactions leads to a different way of delivering information and creating more personalized experiences.
- Human agents will need to learn and adapt to this style of communication with customers in order to make it “feel right.” If done wrong, Gen Z customers may perceive brands as “old” or “dinosaurs”: which will negatively affect customer acquisition and retention.
- 2. Keeping it short and trendy. Gen Z is very comfortable with asynchronous communication, especially visual forms of communication, including apps like Apple’s Facetime or even TikTok, BeReal, and Instagram Reels, have created a culture of quick, emphatic communication with video.
- Businesses must adapt how they connect with their customers to account for this. All of these (TikTok, BeReal, Instagram) are short, sweet, and often emphasize a point for delivery, not tell a story. And it’s all visual.
- This means that agents will need to “show up” to the customer and deliver what they need in an emotive and personal way, over capabilities like real-time video (think telehealth) or short clips that explain how to do something.
- 3. Changing how you work. With asynchronous communication comes the ability to parallelize engagements.
- Rather than being on a single synchronous voice call with a customer at a time, agents can now manage multiple engagements since no one customer requires 100% of the agent’s bandwidth. However, this materially changes how agents need to context switch and manage multiple engagements and continue to deliver that engagement at scale.
Many of the technologies being built today – like Generative AI-driven agent answers – will help alleviate some of this “adapting to the Gen Z way of speaking/interacting.”
Asynchronous/digital engagement channels will benefit most immediately from these technologies, but those real-time engagements with customers will necessitate how human agents learn to adapt quickly (or a new generation of human agents!) to the new Gen Z style of getting things done.
Alain Mowad:
We definitely expect to see a change. Gen Zers, much like millennials, are digitally native and have demonstrated an overwhelming presence for digital channels. This has a positive impact on staffing and training as customer service centers continue to transition to digital communications.
First, it means that it will be much easier to onboard Gen Zers who are already familiar with digital communications and technologies. So, the focus of the training would be more around best practices in communicating with customers in a customer service environment.
Secondly, Gen Zers multitask effectively across multiple digital channels, meaning they can handle significantly more simultaneous digital interactions, which translates to greater efficiencies for the customer service center.
Jessica Smith:
We do expect to see a shift, as we would when customers start to interact with a brand on any new channel.
From a staffing perspective, contact center managers will start looking for fluency and experience with these new channels, and may even note experience with them as a requirement for new hires.
For existing agents, we would anticipate supplementary trainings to help get them up to speed on these new channels so they can be effective and timely in the ways that Gen Z customers now expect and look for.
Mike Szilagyi:
Gen Z’s channel preferences will effect change in contact center staffing in several ways.
It’s important to remember that Gen Z are primarily digital natives and are more adept with online channels than any generation before them. Their use of digital channels, especially messaging, will certainly be higher. As a result, contact centers will need to train and staff for more concurrent digital interactions, leverage virtual agents and co-pilots, and make sure that they are ready for this shift.
Additionally, contact center organizations need to prepare not only for Gen Z as customers, but for Gen Z as employees as well. The older members of this generation (early twenties) are already working in contact centers, and more will inevitably join as the generation matures.
“…contact centers will need to train and staff for more concurrent digital interactions, leverage virtual agents and co-pilots…” —Mike Szilagyi
It will be up to contact center organizations to meet GenZers’ unique needs (they are social and enjoy communication) and provide them with the tools that help them collaborate with peers and work collectively to help customers. Gen Z also favor flexibility, so offering more adjustability in shifts and schedule is important.
Do We Need Disaster Planning?
Disasters can and will strike at any time, anywhere. Call centers must be prepared, first and foremost, to protect the lives of employees and, secondarily, to ensure information and service to customers who would not be aware of the imminent danger to the centers or, worst case, the event that had hit them.
Case in point from personal experience. Tornadoes are arguably one of the scariest storms one can face. They strike suddenly with immense ferocity and destruction. Consequently, they are responsible for huge deaths, injuries, and countless dollars of damage.
With my call center in Indiana, tornadoes are, unfortunately, part of our reality. One that we almost came face-to-face with a few years ago.
It was 4 pm, and suddenly I heard the tornado warning over the speaker in our suite.
I went around to all the agents and instructed them what to say and do; our BPO technician turned off the phones and initiated the adverse weather message. This informed callers that they could use the self-service options as customer service wasn’t available due to a tornado warning in effect.
We evacuated the suite and had everyone assemble in our floor’s lobby, as we had to stay away from the windows. Staying away from windows is crucial during a tornado because its immense force can launch glass fragments, putting anyone nearby at significant risk.
Each department leader was in charge of taking attendance of their team members. Meanwhile, one of the leaders monitored the tornado warning while we waited in the lobby.
It was over an hour, after which we were allowed back into our suite. The key was getting all our agents onto the phones after removing the warning message.
So before we were allowed in, the call center team lead and I asked all our agents to go to their desks, log back into their systems, and be ready to take calls.
As soon as the message was removed and phone lines back on, calls came back to back for 15 to 20 minutes but then slowed down.
Gradually everything returned to normal. Until the next time…
Why Proactive BCP and DRP Are Critical
Most times, we tend to react to situations rather than being proactive. However, relying on reactive measures leaves our judgment susceptible to various biases, including experience, expediency, and safety.
This is where the business continuity plan (BCP) development emerges. The BCP can be either simple based on the size, type of business, and contact center, or a little more involved.
Establishing effective communication channels and protocols is crucial for timely and accurate information dissemination during emergencies. Defining how information will be shared among employees, managers, and customers is vital.
In tandem with a BCP, there needs to be a disaster recovery plan (DRP) because disasters will eventually hit your operations and your people. Again, like the BCP, a DRP would need to be shaped and scaled to the business and contact center.
Here are a few tips to remember while developing a BCP and a DRP.
1. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). During a disruption(s), it is vital to identify the critical business functions and processes within your call center. These may include handling calls and maintaining Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Immediate attention should be given to functions based on the potential risk and prioritized recovery efforts.
2. Define recovery objectives. Determine each critical function’s maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) and recovery time objectives (RTO).
MTD indicates the allowable offline time for your call center, while RTO represents the maximum acceptable downtime for each process. For instance, if your phone system experiences an outage, your goal might be restoring customer calls within two hours.
Protecting Remote Workers
Agents working from home, either full-time or hybrid, also face disasters. Therefore, measures must be taken to protect them.
Since our team is hybrid, where there are days that they work from home, we do our best to ensure their safety. Here is a summary of the steps we have in place that other organizations can consider adopting:
- Communication channels. Set up reliable channels for agents to stay in touch during emergencies, such as a supervisor’s cellphone number. During orientation, we give agents a card with all the call center’s important phone numbers.
- Check-In system. Create a system for regular check-ins to monitor agent safety and well-being. Usually, if an agent is a no-call-no-show, I contact the agent via SMS; if there is no response within a day, I inform HR to contact the agent.
- Emergency contact information. Request an emergency contact person and phone number.
- Agent training on emergency procedures. Conduct training sessions to educate agents on specific procedures for different emergency scenarios.
- Encourage emergency kits. Advise agents to prepare personal emergency kits with essential items. I recall this was useful for an agent who was evacuated from her home due to a forest fire.
—Mark Pereira
3. Develop a communication plan. Establishing effective communication channels and protocols is crucial for timely and accurate information dissemination during emergencies.
Defining how information will be shared among employees, managers, and customers is vital. Additionally, backup communication options should be identified if the primary channels are unavailable, such as utilizing social media or sending SMS updates.
4. Implement data backup and recovery. Regularly ensure critical data and customer information backup, guaranteeing redundancy and security. Store backups securely and contemplate utilizing cloud-based or off-site storage, though I would lean towards cloud storage today. Conduct thorough tests on data recovery processes to confirm their effectiveness.
5. Formulate incident response procedures. A comprehensive set of instructions should be developed to handle various incidents and emergencies such as power outages, network failures, natural disasters, or cybersecurity breaches.
These instructions should provide detailed guidance on the necessary actions to be taken, assign employee roles, and establish escalation routes for reporting incidents and seeking assistance. The goal is to manage risks and minimize any potential downtime effectively.
A high-level natural disaster plan could include the following:
- Monitor relevant weather alerts and warnings to identify potential natural disasters.
- Activate emergency response procedures as outlined in the company’s DRP.
- Ensure employee safety by evacuating the premises and providing clear instructions for evacuation routes and assembly points.
- Establish communication channels to keep employees informed about the status of the natural disaster and any updates regarding office closures or remote work arrangements.
- Coordinate with relevant authorities or emergency services for assistance, if required.
- Document the incident, including the actions taken to ensure employee safety and any damages to the premises, for insurance claims and future disaster preparedness.
6. Establish alternative work locations. Identify alternative work locations or backup sites where your call center operations can be quickly relocated in case of a facility outage. Ensure these sites have the necessary infrastructure, equipment, and connectivity to support uninterrupted functions.
For example, our center adapted to a hybrid model after the COVID-19 pandemic. When a power outage affected ten cubicle spaces, we quickly implemented a plan to ensure uninterrupted operations.
We gradually transitioned agents to work-from-home, starting with three agents simultaneously while the remaining team worked from a conference room. This process continued until all agents were home.
Cold, Warm, and Hot Sites
Business continuity planning (BCP) uses a few terms to describe backup facilities. And they are critical when disasters strike to support those functions that require a portion or all of your operations to be on-premise instead of at home.
- Cold Site. A facility without infrastructure or equipment is readily available. Requires setup and configuration before it can be used, resulting in a longer recovery time but less expensive to maintain.
- Warm Site. A partially equipped site with pre-configured hardware, some software, and data backups. Faster setup than compared to a cold site. Requires some setup and configuration: a balanced cost and recovery time.
- Hot Site. A fully operational and redundant facility mirroring the primary site’s infrastructure, systems, and data. Near-real-time synchronization with minimal data loss. Immediate recovery with no setup required. Most expensive but offers the shortest recovery time.
7. Train and educate employees. Conduct regular training sessions to familiarize your employees with the BCP and DRP. Ensure they understand their roles and responsibilities during emergencies. Provide clear instructions on responding to different scenarios and regularly conduct drills to practice and refine emergency procedures.
In addition to addressing natural disasters, agents should be provided with comprehensive cybersecurity training to effectively identify and respond to suspicious emails, ensuring higher protection against cyber threats.
Such training can be provided to agents through micro-learnings, if not monthly, then quarterly, because cyber criminals usually don’t wait for your employees to complete their annual cybersecurity before they strike.
A BCP and a DRP are invaluable in ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery, even though we cannot anticipate every scenario, such as a pandemic.
8. Streamline emergency preparedness and communication. Centralize your documentation in a single location accessible to all relevant stakeholders. This ensures easy access to the plans during emergencies and facilitates effective updates and communication.
Moreover, centralizing the procedures promotes consistency and coordination among departments or teams involved in recovery.
9. Test and review the plan: Conduct simulated exercises or drills to test your BCP and DRP. Assess the efficiency of your plan and make any required enhancements according to the outcomes. Ensure your plans are regularly updated to mirror any changes in your call center’s operations.
Risk Management
Categorizing risk is an effective method for managing risk in your center. This approach helps you understand the specific risks your call center may face. It allows you to prioritize efforts to avoid (removal of vulnerable software), mitigate (reducing its impact), transfer (outsourcing or insurance), or accept (such as weather, but you still need to monitor the risk) these risks.
Some common categories of risks include:
- Operational risks are related to your call center’s day-to-day operations. Examples may include system failures, network outages, or staffing issues.
- Technological risks are associated with technology, including cybersecurity threats, software vulnerabilities, or hardware failures.
- External risks arise from external factors beyond your control, such as natural disasters or regulatory changes.
- Human risks include risks related to human factors. Examples may consist of employee errors, inadequate training, or malicious activities.
- Financial risks are associated with the financial aspects of your call center, such as budget constraints, economic fluctuations, or unexpected costs.
A BCP and a DRP are invaluable in ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery, even though we cannot anticipate every scenario, such as a pandemic.
It is still crucial to be prepared and have a plan rather than being unprepared and struggling to find solutions during a crisis.
As the saying goes, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” So, let’s ensure our centers hold steady in the face of adversity and keep the calls rolling in. Remember, customers do not take breaks, and neither should we!
When life throws a wrench, stay ahead with a good sense of humor (hopeful and based on the incident) and a plan in your back pocket. This will ensure your call center runs smoothly and keeps your agents sane.
Climbing Over the CCaaS Obstacles
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is clearly today’s dominant trend in tech, but this wouldn’t be happening without the mega trend that preceded it.
That would be the cloud, which is still going strong, and is a necessary condition for AI to become widely adopted. While there’s a gold rush going on now with contact centers to deploy various forms of AI, they need to first be ready to embrace the cloud.
In terms of staying current with cloud-based technology, the rationale for doing so is sound, but in the contact center space, this is easier said than done.
…many contact centers still have reservations about the cloud.
Enterprises have been adopting cloud solutions on many fronts for several years now. And these migrations have largely been successful.
Unified communications (UC) would be the most relevant example, where cloud has emerged as the deployment model of choice. And unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) is displacing most premise-based UC solutions.
One reason why UCaaS is so relevant is that many of these vendors also offer contact center solutions, and they are aggressively going to market with their cloud-based contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) offerings.
For these particular vendors, the recent trend has been to offer joint deployments of UCaaS and CCaaS, and in some cases, it’s a great solution. Having one technology partner for both makes things easier for IT, and it streamlines the broader cloud migration for the business.
However, there are many other cases where CCaaS is more challenging to deploy than UCaaS, leading the business to go cloud with UC, but to keep the legacy, premises-based contact center deployment in place.
This approach is tenable for now, but as AI becomes more of a must-have for customer service, cloud-based solutions for the contact center will become necessary.
As an analyst, I attend many industry events, and this issue is a recurring theme. While most businesses are well on their way to adopting UCaaS for workplace communication, their contact center applications tend to remain premise-based. CCaaS adoption is definitely gaining traction, but many contact centers still have reservations about the cloud.
Based on the trends I’m seeing, here are three obstacles to cloud adoption, along with the trade-offs contact center leaders need to consider with CCaaS.
Obstacle 1: Loss of Control
Premise-based contact centers are largely based on legacy technology that has been carefully fine-tuned over many years across a patchwork of complex, custom integrations.
To maintain a high-performing operation, IT requires a lot of hands-on support based on vendor-specific expertise. While it’s understandable why IT doesn’t want to move on from this, business leaders – not just contact center leaders – need to view this reluctance as an impediment to adopting new technology that can provide the kind of customer service that is needed.
Maintaining this level of control may serve IT well in terms of preserving the status quo for their sphere of organizational influence. But it may not serve the needs of the business, especially in highly competitive markets.
Going to the cloud means giving up control over managing the contact center. And some IT leaders may not be prepared to do that, especially if they have been the architects of what’s been in place for a long time.
The counterargument is that the legacy premise-based technology they’re trying to maintain has diminishing value and is preventing the contact center from bringing in the kind of innovation customers have come to expect.
Customer-centric leaders are well-aware that customers have already adopted these new technologies. And keeping pace with that is more important than IT’s need to keep control over a system that inherently cannot adapt to these new expectations.
Obstacle 2: Financial Considerations
Without even considering the cloud for modernizing the contact center, the preferred approach for some IT leaders would simply be to upgrade their premise-based systems with newer iterations of the same.
This policy would allow IT to extend the status quo they are so comfortable with for the contact center, as well as maintain their operational influence overall.
…cloud, especially with AI, is constantly evolving, so it will maintain high value over time…
Again, this is a favorable scenario for IT, but much less so for the business, especially where cloud has been successfully adopted elsewhere in the organization.
Fortunately, the realities of technology today dictate otherwise, especially in two areas.
First is the fact that contact center vendors are striving to become cloud-first – and some cloud-only – and R&D has moved almost entirely away from legacy systems.
There is only so much modernizing IT can do with premise-based offerings, and even the best of it will not be enough to meet today’s customer experience (CX) expectations.
Second, as cloud adoption advances, CapEx is getting harder to come by, and IT simply won’t have the financial resources to keep investing in legacy contact center solutions.
These factors alone may well force IT’s hand for going with CCaaS, but the business case gets even stronger when considering the financial virtues of the cloud.
The SaaS business model makes the cloud attractive by shifting the spend from CapEx to OpEx, which is easier to manage financially. If IT has no CapEx for a premise-based upgrade, the bridge to modernization will be much shorter with cloud since it’s being consumed as-a-service without any capitalized investment.
The big trade-off here is that CCaaS is an ongoing cost, so much like renting, the long-term expenditure will be higher.
That said, cloud, especially with AI, is constantly evolving, so it will maintain high value over time with innovation to enable contact centers to keep adapting to changing customer needs.
Obstacle 3: Disruption to Operations
This attribute is related to the first obstacle in that by remaining premise-based, there will be no disruption to the contact center when upgrading with newer technology. Having a highly reliable operation is another reason to maintain the status quo, and by extension, to not adopt the cloud.
Again, that is only true to a limited extent, since even the latest premise-based offerings cannot deliver the modernization that contact centers really need.
Ironically, while a shift from on-premise to cloud could be very disruptive to the contact center, the cloud is arguably more reliable in terms of uptime and business continuity. This point is becoming more important as business operations face increasingly severe threats from natural and human-made disasters, with staff, like remote agents, as well as applications and data being dispersed.
Of course, this is a different kind of disruption: namely ongoing service reliability, as opposed to the short-term disruption that can arise when migrating from premise to cloud.
Long-term, however, the former is more important for maintaining good CX. Today’s customers expect 24/7 service, and with global customer bases, this capability becomes even more important.
…while a shift from on-premise to cloud could be very disruptive to the contact center, the cloud is arguably more reliable…
Another consideration for overcoming this holdback is how vendors are helping contact centers migrate to the cloud. If managed poorly, this transition can be very disruptive, and that’s a valid reason for IT to not go with CCaaS.
However, since many vendors have transitioned their product lines from premise to cloud, by nature they can do this seamlessly: otherwise, they will not succeed with CCaaS.
While the possibility of a cloud migration being disruptive to operations certainly exists, once IT leaders see evidence that vendors can do this with minimal disruption, this obstacle should cease being an issue.