Contact Centers

Do your agents deliver superior CX customers expect at every touchpoint (or micromoment) in their end-to-end journeys? Focusing on each touchpoint not only optimizes service, it allows you to anticipate customer needs and remove friction throughout the process. Customers have so many options to choose from now, so keeping their loyalty is crucial to increasing revenue.

Where do you start? Get actionable, expert advice from nine CX practitioners working in education, finance, healthcare, and technology industries. They share their stories in “CX Best Practices: Micromoments that Create Forever Customer Loyalty.” In this eBook, you’ll learn:

• How they overcame challenges that affected achieving their CX goals
• Best practices to enhance CX even if customers never speak with agents
• Metrics to track to see if you’re meeting your CX goals
• The impact of eliminating friction at every micromoment to improve CX
• Why customer preferences expose weaknesses in technology and processes, and how you navigate making changes

Providing a seamless customer journey has become the main component driving CSAT. However, many companies are still not in sync with the effortless self-service customers expect.

This white paper created in partnership with Frost & Sullivan will show you how to generate an effective omnichannel customer journey. You’ll learn how to leverage rich data across all channels to improve self‐service. Your customers deserve access to first-class technology to help them drive their own experience and find the help they need.

Learn to effectively:

• Eliminate unnecessary channel transfers
• Remove customer friction and provide real-time solutions
• Provide customers with their preferred channel option
• Build smooth customer journeys and meet them where they start
• Capture, analyze, and share real‐time data to improve CX

Customer experience personalization is no longer a “nice-to have.” In today’s digital-first world, it’s now a “must have.”

81% of organizations see CX as a differentiator and the number one indicator of strategic performance.

Wherever you are in your journey, this eBook provides innovations on how you can harness technology to improve your company’s approach to personalization—leading to a better performing business.

Inside, you’ll find ideas on:

• Enabling the customer to pick up where they left off on any channel
• Sending outbound messages for milestones such as birthdays and anniversaries
• Transparently addressing service failures
• Responding to customer comments
• Recommending content, products, or offers that most fit customer needs

Customer expectations and preferences are rapidly changing in a world of streamlined, efficient services and technology. That means the digital channels your contact center offers should be optimized to meet customer needs at any given point of their journey. This recent report from Aberdeen analyzes specific advantages of phasing out traditional self-service channels in favor of more AI-driven, intelligent programs.

In this report, you’ll find key strategies backed by data on how smart self-service enhances CX, such as:

• Adapting self-service capabilities to better suit customer needs
• Establishing strong, intelligent digital channels to optimize agent workloads
• Using AI and analytics to incorporate intelligence into interactions
• Delivering consistent, personalized experiences across all digital channels
• Leveraging automation to improve the self-service experience

What’s a fast way to build your digital-first agent workforce? Get expert advice along with some funny memes that highlight agent experiences. The Ultimate CX Agent Guide shows you how to find and develop agents who can build customer connections in any channel. Agents handle complex interactions in over 30 voice and digital channels—the call center impact on digital CX affects revenue. Develop a training program that raises job satisfaction and empowers agents to deliver great CX in omnichannel environments.

Customer care leaders are in the heart of a perfect storm.

After a couple of tough years, much of which had consumers conducting their shopping online, customers are tired and frustrated, service cases are up, agents are disengaged, attrition is rampant, and employees are hard to replace.

Even more than that, customer expectations are at an all-time high, inflation is a concern, and many digital solutions aren’t delivering on their promises.

Customers have options. Brands that don’t deliver risk losing those customers quickly and without warning.

A recent study found that it’s becoming more difficult to carry a customer through the complete buying process, with 96% of respondents saying that a negative customer service experience is enough to determine whether or not they would buy from that company again.

Yet it’s not hopeless. Companies can increase brand loyalty by balancing human touch from knowledgeable agents with digital self-service for a more personalized customer journey. This balance can be achieved using real-time customer insights that will improve agent job performance, customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and increase revenues.

Brands Must Adapt to Dividing Generational Behaviors

Today, the customer “one and done” mentality is peaking, with 12% reporting they would drop a brand after only ONE negative service experience.

In retail, for example, consumers have a variety of options at their fingertips and are equally quick to choose alternatives when they tire of leaping through problem-solving hoops with a brand.

Customers will ghost your brand without notice…

Generational preferences also have an impact on consumer behavior. With the evolution of eCommerce and an overwhelming number of resources available on retailers’ websites, 40% of Gen Z customers reported that if they can’t resolve an issue on their own, then they will abandon the brand.

Gen Z data has to be taken very seriously. At nearly a quarter of the current U.S. population, the preferences of this rising consumer demographic are pulling retailer reactions in new directions. Moreover, Gen Z customers have—and exercise—the power to effectively influence other customers’ buying and loyalty through social media.

On the flip side, while this group typically prefers self-service, some other demographics still prefer live human interaction when trying to solve a problem. Research shows that more than 52% of Baby Boomers have said they will drop a brand if they can’t speak to a person or representative.

This data underscores the need to balance human and computer-based service options and, more importantly, to have them work in sync.

Meeting the needs of all requires time and attention, leading to potential overhead increase. But what about macro-environmental factors?

Economic Pressures Mean Every Dollar Counts

Today’s tough economic environment is putting increased pressure on profits, meaning every moment spent digitally has a huge impact on conversions.

Customers will ghost your brand without notice — no angry emails, poor survey responses, or negative online reviews.

In fact, 46% of customers surveyed rarely or never complain about bad experiences, an increase of 2% over last year. Research indicates that in the U.S. alone, $62 billion is lost each year due to poor customer service.

Personalization and Consistency Are Key to Customer Retention

So how can companies identify, anticipate, and respond to potential friction points for consumers?

Step One is understanding that no two people are the same. We need to start thinking about people vs personas.

Personalization is the key to accomplishing this. According to a 2020 McKinsey study, offering a personalized customer experience (CX) is one of the greatest challenges that retailers face.

That said, a CX done well can differentiate a business from its competitors and improve customer satisfaction.

Whereas before a company could stand out through promotion and pricing, that strategy can be easily duplicated by competitors.

In this vast market of retailers, top retailers like Amazon have raised the stakes, making elements like personalized shopping recommendations and responsive customer support not only a great differentiator, but a basic expectation of customers.

Across the demographics surveyed, to have the best purchasing experience, customers expect the service and support agents they interact with to be consistent, accurate, and fast. As many as 22% of customers would abandon a brand after getting conflicting information from customer service and support agents.

On the flip side, exceptional customer service builds loyalty and long-term customer value. Tools that can predict what a customer or service agent is looking for and present the item or information seamlessly are the key to creating a standout service experience.

Which brings us to Step Two of adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technology. AI has the ability to use past user behavior to identify like-minded groups and group characteristics.

Through creating a customer profile, the AI will tailor search results to best meet the expectations of new users and customers. This technology helps organizations provide personalized experiences for both customers and support for agents.

Search solutions powered by tools such as AI search and content personalization engines offer recommendations based on past interactions from other users, ensuring that customers and support agents alike will be able to find more relevant information, tied to their specific requests.

It’s important to recognize that, despite investments in call deflection, customer insights, and knowledge management, agents are still struggling to find the right information at the right moment.

According to our Service Relevance Report, 41% of the information that the average person working in customer support received at work every day is irrelevant to their job role — a 65% leap over last year’s findings.

No brand can account for every customer touchpoint 24/7 — at least not without the support of technology.

By leveraging AI-powered tools, brands don’t just better understand their customers’ needs. They can also deliver relevant content to resolve support issues quickly and efficiently, whether through self- service or contact center channels.

AI also powers machine learning. When incorporated into customer support strategies, machine learning enables customers to help themselves, significantly increasing customer success rates, as well as reducing the amount of time that customers need to take to find the answers and resources they need.

And for customers that require an agent to help them, machine learning also helps employees find what they need to provide rapid support.

Further, the information gathered through AI-search tools provides companies with the metrics necessary to keep information on the website updated, show the popularity among the website offerings, and take the guesswork out of addressing customer needs.

More than ever before, customer care is the key to increasing revenue and sustaining business. AI-driven personalization applications can help you unlock the door.

Customers are arguably edgy in these uncertain times, what with the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, the economy, global and domestic political chaos, and the climate emergency leading to disastrous and too often deadly fire and weather events.

With contact centers engaging with customers, particularly with what may be a permanent shift of much of retail and meals to eCommerce, how is this impacting the need for and how best to listen and capture the voice of the customer (VoC)? To ensure effective quality monitoring (QM) so that those voices are heard and heeded?

To find out we had virtual conversations with thought leaders from leading vendors. They are Heather Hughes, Director of Marketing, NICE, Rachel Lane, Contact Center Solutions Principal, Medallia, and David Singer, Vice President, Product Strategy, Verint.

Q. What are you hearing from contact centers about their need and requirements for VoC, QM applications? Has this changed since last year? Before the COVID-19 pandemic?

Heather Hughes:

As the speed of experiences across a wide variety of digital channels has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for actionable voice of the customer programs has increased as well.

Contact center leaders recognize that VoC and QM together provide a stronger set of data upon which to act – whether through agent training and coaching or by triggering follow up with customers, such as white-glove service.

“…it’s more important than ever that businesses recognize that VoC, QM, and performance management are the best tools to measure and improve customer satisfaction.” —Heather Hughes

With stakes so high and customer loyalty dependent not on the brand but on their interactions, it’s more important than ever that businesses recognize that VoC, QM, and performance management are the best tools to measure and improve customer satisfaction. And learn about how customers experience brands.

In particular, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven QM is helping organizations hone soft-skill behavioral coaching opportunities and best practices.

Rachel Lane:

The needs of the contact center continue to evolve. However, the benefit of hindsight has also given organizations a firm window to the future.

In terms of VoC, there is still a trend for understanding digital deflection. For those organizations that have been increasingly embracing digital transformation, we are seeing that the urge to implement self-service has never been so rapidly budgeted for and adopted across the contact center. Both in conversational analytics and speech analytics.

The latter is being widely adopted to understand the service needs of the former. While automation is the mother of managing simple tasks, speech analytics is used to better understand how more complex customer needs are being met.

In terms of quality management, we are seeing a much greater emphasis on automated quality assurance (QA) and coaching for performance management.

Frontline attrition continues to be a huge challenge, which is further exasperated by the struggle to hire in today’s competitive labor market.

That means QM is being used to both draw attention to areas needing improvement and to help agents help themselves coach up with learning management system (LMS) integrations and gamification. This helps them to show impressive performance growth, which can then be rewarded with things like shift preferences (i.e. during the day versus at night) in addition to the usual compensation.

This personal ownership of performance growth is helping to better engage the workforce and provide pathways to career success. Lack of opportunities for future growth and career pathways is one of the key reasons for frontline attrition today.

David Singer:

Contact centers are leaning into VoC and QM solutions now more than ever with the realization that work-from-home (WFH) is here to stay, pushing organizations to connect remote workers to the workplace and to customers virtually.

Effectively, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified digital immediacy, especially in customer care. At the same time, it conditioned people to accept constant change as the new normal.

Real-time VoC and QM solutions are becoming increasingly important to help contact center agents provide in-the-moment assistance to customers who have come to expect instant resolution and response.

In the case of customer experience (CX), there is no time to wait to measure and act on customer feedback because, by then, it might be different again. Owning the moment to enrich the CX is pushing companies to leverage the power of technology to analyze, navigate, and execute in real-time.

Q. There has been a debate between VoC systems, call recordings/online interaction capture, and social listening as to which method provides the most accurate understanding of the CX. Do these methods complement each other? Or compete/overlap?

Heather Hughes: Various methods used to assess customer sentiment ultimately provide a holistic, complementary approach to understanding and taking action on customer feedback to increase satisfaction at each engagement point, and across the entire customer journey.

This comprehensive approach to customer feedback allows brands to improve their overall approach by casting a wider net. This way they can incorporate both direct and indirect feedback, and structured and unstructured data, into their CX approach to make real-time changes before problems become more pervasive and harder to fix.

At their core, VoC programs provide customers ample feedback opportunities at multiple points throughout their journeys, while providing companies ample opportunities to close the loop with customers and increase loyalty.

With the rise of digital channels and deployment of self-service capabilities such as chatbots and even SEO-driven help center articles, many customers might take to social media to air their grievances instead of going to the company directly to complain. Social listening makes their voices heard and gives brands an opportunity to understand – and correct – the situations before it’s too late.

Furthermore, call recording, interaction capture, and post-interaction feedback allow companies insight into CXs in real time. Additionally, they can better understand if feedback is a result of broader training and operational issues, an individualized agent interaction which can be addressed one-on-one, or an issue related to, as examples, a product offering or a marketing campaign.

Rachel Lane: Each of these has its own merits; the VoC system should be able to accommodate all customer data and analyze across the customer’s voice regardless of channel, providing data to inform every part of a customer journey.

However, there are two plays here: one being which method is providing the most immediate use to the customer at the moment of truth and the other being which method gives the most business value after the fact.

That said, while the organization is facing the moment of truth, the fact that on a digital channel a business can engage during a customer’s online interaction to save a journey or redirect it to another channel is likely the one that gives the most immediate benefit to the customer. And should not be disregarded.

I would argue that call recordings by themselves only serve the customer in terms of compliance and the promise of better training for future calls. It’s not the call recordings that make the grade but the speech analytics that the recording feeds to analyze the call.

“…the VoC system should be able to…analyze across the customer’s voice regardless of channel…” —Rachel Lane

Speech analytics is the absolute must-have solution to understand both why your customers are calling and if they are satisfied with the service they receive.

Speech analytics yields huge financial benefits to the contact centers by enabling business leaders to make sound operational business decisions about agent coaching, process improvement, and product improvement.

Additionally, speech analytics can be combined with other solutions to enable next-best-action prompts for agents to serve the customers better, and can prompt an automated process in the background to save customer efforts, such as needless form fill-ins.

Social engagement has also come into its own over the last couple of years as brands have now put elegant service processing around it to be able to identify customers more easily.

Up until that point, the social service that was provided was not able to be linked to a customer and, therefore, was more difficult to understand and evaluate its contribution to customer and business success.

David Singer: Each of these technologies is complementary and every method of collecting and measuring customer insights plays a vital role in driving exceptional CX.

This is why taking a unified approach is so important. It is a “total quality” approach — one that enables companies to greatly increase the number of monitored channels and interactions, reduce the risk of non-compliance, infuse the process with the customer perspective of quality, and automate real-time coaching to ensure positive outcomes.

VoC is explicit customer feedback typically collected via surveys, while customer insights captured from call recordings/online interactions feed speech and text analytics to obtain inferred feedback.

At the same time, social listening is the standard monitoring of public-facing feedback posted to social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter, but not to be confused with direct messaging channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

The key is understanding that people will express their experiences differently depending on their use of different feedback channels.

For example, customer feedback surveys provide an accurate measure of experiences customers feel are noteworthy to share. However, a customer will often provide feedback when the experience is excellent or terrible, but nothing when the experience is “middle of the road.”

You may have a situation where a customer tries to self-resolve more than once and then resorts to speaking to a live person. The inferred insights that might be articulated such as, “I tried the website and chat box and thankfully I got a live agent,” is also essential to capture, pushing companies to measure and monitor “fill in the blank” moments.

With social listening, customers have been conditioned to get a faster response from a company if they complain publicly on social channels. Companies need to filter social listening to what is general social discourse versus social “uprising,” meant to elicit an immediate response.

These forms for monitoring and measuring VoC are complementary and should be triangulated to inform a total quality approach to CX.

Q. There have been several developments that have been coming to the fore that include the following. Do they affect VoC? QM? And if so, how? Are there other changes occurring now or are just over the horizon that will impact the CX?

1. The rise of asynchronous messaging and coming of age of video for customer interactions.

Heather Hughes: Customers expect to interact with brands in ever-increasing ways. Video and asynchronous digital messaging social are two examples that amplify the need to take a holistic rather than a fragmented view of the CX at every touchpoint in their journeys. That means empowering contextual next-best-actions that improve customer loyalty and agent experience.

Rachel Lane: Meeting customers where they are has driven the adoption of extra channels of engagement over the years.

Today, video and asynchronous messaging are both natural ways to have customers engage at times of their choosing when urgent responses are not required.

The use of video grew exponentially across a much wider demographic during the pandemic with families using video meetings to stay connected.

I believe video is here to stay and can provide some wonderful examples of customers showing brands exactly what they are seeing and not just what they are thinking.

David Singer: The difference between asynchronous messaging and other digital channels is the extended and interrupted nature of the conversation.

With asynchronous messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, a customer can start, pause, or resume engagement with an agent online over a more extended period – sometimes hours or days.

Satisfying this expectation so that time-to-resolution is on the customer’s terms, and not the business’s is important to understand in the context of first-contact resolution expectations.

The differences in customer perception that is based on the channel they are using will impact how a company should measure and improve quality.

2. The smartphone as the primary means of voice and digital communications.

Heather Hughes: Smartphones combine not only our ability to call, but also to text, email, chat, search the web, and engage in social media.

This means that most customer journeys become more complex and non-linear. The result is that the quality of the entire experience is not just a “sum” of the individual interactions—but requires a more holistic quality management approach to eliminate friction on every touchpoint.

Rachel Lane: Smartphone use has enabled brands to communicate with their customers much more cheaply, giving many more options for engagement. Geo-push messaging also allows brands highly relevant offers/information in-the-moment.

David Singer: It’s been said that “the phone is the branch of the digital consumer.” Suppose you’re online banking, and you can’t execute via the mobile self-service app. So, you speak to an agent at the click of a button.

Smartphones have significantly decreased the friction of channel hopping. Using them as the primary means of voice and digital engagement is becoming increasingly less disruptive and more accessible than ever.

Some interactions are easier to say, while others are easier to type. One interaction that spans multiple channels is a good thing, and now it’s happening right in the palm of your hand.

3. The Great Resignation and high contact center agent turnover.

Heather Hughes: The best part about a holistic VoC system and approach is the ability to consistently check the pulse on customer feedback and make quicker pivots to accommodate.

With customer patience running thin and employee turnover increasing, protecting your frontline agents is imperative.

By adjusting processes and operations based on customer sentiment, and helping agents with real-time guidance empowered by AI, brands are able to reduce the number of upset customers – often a key driver of agent turnover – faster by capturing accurate feedback. And address it in a timely manner.

These methods also strengthens an employer’s bond with their employees by working to eliminate barriers and create a pleasant working environment.

David Singer: Contact centers have always had a turnover problem, and this continues to persist. With high turnover, retaining agents is increasingly more challenging – the rotating door is spinning faster out than in – which is challenging and exacerbates the onboarding and training of new agents.

Losing experienced agents makes it very difficult to consistently deliver good CX, especially when your agents are always new. This makes real-time quality and CX measurement critical to feeding in-the-moment coaching necessary to support new agents.

4. The apparent permanent shift to wfh exclusively or in hybrid environments.

Heather Hughes: VoC becomes more important when working with a hybrid or remote workforce to ensure that interaction quality isn’t declining with the lack of in-person oversight.

VoC and QM both play an important role in ensuring quality interactions for all customers, especially in an environment that makes having training and operational standards harder to maintain. But at the same time, it means that organizations must have an automatic way of measuring quality with AI anytime, anywhere.

Rachel Lane: The shift to flexible working has been huge in the world of the contact center. For some brands the adjustment was large, firstly from tech and security perspectives and then from a workforce management perspective.

Ultimately in today’s tight labor market, it has become imperative that flexible working options are part of the candidate offering. It will give organizations the best chance of optimizing their workforces with skilled employees and potentially enable organizations to have every hour of the day be fully productive.

Flexible working will also likely mean that businesses will have more agents employed but less as full-time employees.

So, in looking at the current employment landscape, we are also seeing keen deployment of employee experience programs designed to capture employee engagement and understanding indicators of potential attrition.

David Singer: Companies need systems to measure, coach, and improve quality performance in hybrid work environments. At the same time, real-time CX measurement is critical when a supervisor “walking the floor” is no longer an option.

The real change is the mindset shift from the initial “we will get through this until we get back to the office” to now “we have to deal with this forever.”

Being able to keep up with this ongoing change hinges on having tools to provide better monitoring and coaching and which address the needs of the remote workplace. These tools can provide agent support to help connect employees who are feeling lost and disconnected and can’t reach over to the next desk and ask for help.

Q. What are your recommendations to contact centers to help them understand customers and deliver high quality CX?

Heather Hughes: Using tools that allow for both direct and indirect customer feedback is key to seeing the entire picture. The key to getting a holistic view from all kinds of feedback is taking contextual, personalized, next-best-actions to improve both agent and customer experiences.

Equally important is using CX applications that have embedded AI to help organizations make more informed decisions about improving the CX as they get smarter automatically with every customer interaction.

Lastly, a holistic contact center platform will not only enhance CX but will also prioritize privacy and security in a digital-first, online world.

Rachel Lane: It is so important to collect and analyze engagement across all channels correctly and aggregate all of those insights in a single platform to analyze key pain points.

Organizations should create stories from the data and share those stories across the organization so that the customer always has a seat in the board room.

Additionally, segmenting customer data into profiles or cohorts and using this information to deliver journey orchestration and predictive analytics to understand sentiment from customers who do not engage or leave feedback is really important. Organizations can use this data to drive customer-centric service design and realistic growth targets.

David Singer: Delivering exceptional CX requires a total quality effort. Companies must think about measurement and monitoring in a holistic way. You have to measure quality and equally provide agent support across all engagement channels and modalities. At the same time, you must understand that CX may expand multiple touchpoints by two to three or four channels.

Making improvements requires working across two dimensions: breaking down the silos to enable CX measurement and continuous improvement across all customer engagement channels; and making VoC and QM real-time.

With the escalating rate of change in the world, there is no time to wait for a deep analysis before you act. You need to be able to gather and act on customer insights in as close to real-time as possible. When an experience is going downhill, you must improve at that moment, not just fix it for the next time.

Exceptional customer experiences (CXs) are critical to short- and long-term business success. Because of this, it’s instrumental to have a detailed understanding of what occurs during each customer interaction and along the customer journey. In fact, these insights have shifted from nice-to-have to need-to-have.

Now, more than ever, service-centric businesses must prioritize integrated quality monitoring (QM) and analytics applications within their contact center: the mecca of customer interactions and the foundation for raising the quality of CXs.

Here’s the gist. With speech and text analytics applications that convert phone conversations and written communications (i.e., emails, free-form feedback surveys, social media interactions) into transcripts, insights, and actions, contact centers can better identify coaching and training opportunities for agents.

These applications can equally discover where and why competitors are winning over them. Plus, they can learn which products and services are meeting expectations and which are not.

Are agents following protocol, or do we have training gaps that we need to address? Is a new product generating a lot of inbound calls from customers? Are negative words or phrases regularly coming up during conversations, and if so, why?

With combined QM and analytics capabilities, organizations can easily answer these questions and more. They provide the full view of customer interactions, helping teams make data-backed decisions to improve experiences, helping to drive revenue and scale the business.

It is not just the business and customers who benefit from these applications. Contact center agents themselves will be able to pinpoint areas of improvement that, when acted upon, help to shape and advance their customer relationships and their careers.

Robust QM and analytics applications, working together, create a win-win-win scenario for leaders…

These tools are not meant to solely mine for interactions that need improvement; they are used to look for opportunities to further help and support teams.

For example, through QM, a contact center manager might notice an agent has had one too many difficult interactions in a row with customers and can step in to tell them to take a mental health break. That way, the agent does not continue taking calls with other customers when they are already worn out or frustrated leading to second-rate interactions.

Robust QM and analytics applications, working together, create a win-win-win scenario for leaders looking to increase competitiveness, keep customers happy, and ensure the workforce is fulfilled and engaged.

So why, then, are organizations still not prioritizing these applications within their contact centers? Why does the average organization evaluate only 2% of all customer interactions, and how can they ensure those 2% of interactions can represent the other 98%?

Perceived Barriers to Adoption

The simple and honest answer is analytics can be intimidating. There is so much data to gather, quality check, and analyze, plus disparate systems and data silos running wild in most organizations. Research from 451 Research from 451 Research reported that 39% of highly data-driven organizations have more than 50 data silos.

Deploying contact center analytics solutions, figuring out what should be tracked, how to track it, what the reports will look like, and who will be contributing to them is understandably overwhelming and cumbersome. The perception alone of analytics being difficult to deploy and execute can halt progress altogether.

The cost of QM and analytics applications also can be a barrier for contact center leaders whose budgets are already often squeezed whether in times of economic prosperity or uncertainty.

Beyond the technology itself, to effectively deploy a QM and analytics program, organizations have historically needed experienced analysts to oversee the process. Depending on the size of the business and the number of contact centers, the number of analysts needed can be significant.

However, leaders need to look at the payoff rather than initial investment. When properly implemented and supported by talent with the right skill sets, analytics solutions can pay for themselves in three-to-six months via operational savings or revenue increases found through root-cause analysis and improvements.

Equally important, today’s analytics solutions should be intuitive enough that the ask for analyst headcount isn’t so great.

Leaders are often unsure of where to start, how they can prove value in the near term, and if they can guarantee ROI over the long haul with new, robust solutions. These doubts result in either inaction or taking on too much too soon, and ultimately fall short of any meaningful results—but it does not have to be that way.

The ‘Three Ps’ of Analytics-Fueled QM

There is good news: leaders looking to accurately and cost effectively analyze customer interactions and agent activity can do so with the support of modern applications. They address perceived barriers, capture data across the enterprise, pull out predictive and prescriptive insights, and help tell the full story of what customers are experiencing—all 100% of them.

…we’re all familiar with the “this call will be monitored for quality purposes” prompt—but it is time to make that phrase truly count.

When organizations embrace technology that can enhance and introduce new quality and analytics capabilities in the contact center, everyone benefits. Here are three areas where these solutions make a substantial impact:

1. Protocols. Analyzing interactions between customers and agents allows contact center managers and other leaders to identify areas of improvement across the enterprise, especially as it relates to whether protocols are being accurately followed or not. This improves both the customer experience and helps to reduce stressful situations for agents.

The AAA Northeast team, for example, used analytics to discover that the calls members made from highways were receiving the lowest quality score of all calls and, more importantly, took substantially more time for agents to resolve.

Given these calls are typically tied to safety and emergency situations, AAA leaders quickly set out to resolve this issue.

Through a combination of speech and desktop analytics, they found agents were inconsistent in how they interacted with members stranded on highways and often asked irrelevant questions about members’ locations because they didn’t know how to use AAA’s GPS tool.

Leaders were then able to revise the required call flow and implemented new training for the GPS tool, which led to a decrease in average call time by 14 seconds for all calls and by 53 seconds for highway calls.

2. Phrases. Contact centers should be monitoring and analyzing 100% of calls, interactions, and other desktop activity, rather than relying on one-off monitoring and a small subset of interactions to try to piece together themes.

With the right QM and analytics applications in place, they can better understand when and why agents and customers use critical words or phrases and learn about other related phrases they can track to optimize their analytics.

A primary example of this is the classic “I want to cancel my service” phrase. Contact centers should be monitoring for interactions like this as well as other related phrases, including “can I speak to a manager”, “I want to opt-out”, or “I want to downgrade my service.”

These are all trigger phrases that allow leaders to dive deeper and understand the context for why a customer’s experience was subpar. They can then course correct as needed, whether by agent coaching or evaluating the causes for the customer reach-out in the first place.

3. Predictive evaluations. Monitoring for key phrases ties directly into predictive evaluations, which essentially allows organizations to select interactions with low predictive scores, helping them find the most impactful communications to analyze.

A solution with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, for example, can learn from human-completed evaluations as well as speech analytics data to predict evaluation scores on 100% of all customer interactions. This helps organizations anticipate customer needs, resolve issues faster, and deliver more personalized interactions.

Most organizations today have some level of QM—we’re all familiar with the “this call will be monitored for quality purposes” prompt—but it is time to make that phrase truly count.

Contact centers must uplevel those capabilities with robust analytics applications, gain deeper contextual data and insights, and get the most out of each customer interaction.

If you have ever attempted to coach a contact center agent with 10-plus years of experience, then you already know that it is a very different scenario than coaching someone with two to three years of experience.

I use the words “attempted to coach” deliberately, given that tenured agents can be challenging to coach, particularly if you are less experienced, have had less time in the role, or are years their junior. Often, more experienced employees do not appreciate the leadership styles of a younger generation of team leads and coaches.

It would be misleading to suggest that an older, more experienced agent wouldn’t work well with a much younger, inexperienced coach – because we have seen it work well in many organizations. High-performing agents value and embrace feedback and support no matter where it originates. With the appropriate level of respect, two people of any age, background, and experience level can make it work.

Success comes from ensuring a culture of “coaching” – one in which the team lead or supervisor understands that their primary role is to support (and yes, even work for) the agent.

While there has been much talk about the Great Resignation, there are certain organizations where that is not the case.

Over the years, I have worked with several clients that never had a problem with attrition and given great benefits and above-average compensation. And having many customer service agents with tenure (some approaching 30-plus years) can come with its own set of issues.

…anyone doing the same job for years can become numbed by the monotony and sameness of the work.

In the past, after a few years, agents would progress in the organization to take on different roles in quality assurance (QA), training, operations, coaching, or management.

However, some contact center agents aren’t well-suited for people management roles or simply don’t want greater responsibility…so they sit in similar, parallel jobs for years. Given their experience, they may often be your most knowledgeable agents, but they can also be your most challenging, difficult, and demanding employees, making them extremely difficult to coach.

The reality is that anyone doing the same job for years can become numbed by the monotony and sameness of the work.

While such individuals can often deliver a good customer service experience routinely, without thinking, they may lack some of the more nuanced skills. Like empathy and aligning communication styles that have helped lift Net Promoter Scores for many centers over the last several years. They may also be consistently good at applying policies/procedures but are sorely lacking in engaging customers.

Four Reasons Why Seasoned Agents Don’t Do What We Ask of Them

There are essentially four reasons why seasoned contact center agents don’t do what we ask them to.

1. They have forgotten

This is most likely the case, given the time most tenured agents have been out of a structured training environment.

2. They don’t know how

These agents may understand theoretically, but when it comes to demonstrating the skill with a live customer, they don’t know how to apply the knowledge. And they may be embarrassed or otherwise reluctant to put up their hands and ask for help.

3. It conflicts with something else they have been asked to do

This is quite common among customer service agents who have been employed with the same company in the same role for a number of years.

It can be challenging to remember what the policy, procedure, or “standard of the moment” might be, and as a result, the agent may revert to what they are most familiar with. If your center has high turnover among its Team Leads, Supervisors, or Coaches, different styles and approaches can also come into conflict.

4. They don’t want to

This is also quite common among tenured customer service agents. With years of experience, they may disagree with the approach suggested by the coach and feel they know better.

You may hear: “I’ve been doing it this way for years, and it works for me.” And in some cases, that may be true!

But in other situations, these agents may simply not respect the coaches and disregard or begrudgingly brush off what is requested. It may be embarrassing for them to take direction from someone significantly younger and less experienced than themselves (whether actual or perceived).

It is relatively easy to address an agent not knowing, forgetting, or being in conflict (1-3 above). But when it comes to not wanting to, that is where the challenge begins!

In dealing with employee engagement, we often come across individuals with a long work history who have simply stopped caring. There was most likely a time when they were fully engaged, but something happened to lose their interest and trust.

How We Think About “Success” Needs to Change

We have traditionally measured an individual’s success in business by their “upward mobility,” or how fast a person climbs the corporate ladder.

This idea doesn’t fit well within today’s corporate reality and can derail employee engagement. Many disgruntled customer service agents speak of patiently waiting for a promotion that simply isn’t materializing, primarily given that older managers are working longer.

This situation leaves tenured contact center agents feeling undervalued and disconnected. In many cases, the perception of “favoritism” can creep in as others fill the few available positions.

Why don’t these highly experienced and tenured customer service agents (who are not moving up in the organization and “hate” their jobs) simply go elsewhere?

Indeed, many do. However, in interviews, they have told us that they have invested too much time in the organization to leave and that starting over elsewhere would be difficult and equally uncertain.

It is simply easier to stay put and wait for the day when they can retire — which does not provide the foundation for an engaged employee!

With self-service options reducing the number of customer service roles and the support required, we must make it okay to stay in the role of a front-line contact center agent for a long time. And with that comes the need for everyone to be open to regular, ongoing coaching – wherever it comes from.

And so, how do we encourage a customer service agent who has been working with us for several years to re-engage and be open to coaching?

The role of the Coach is not a “boss” but rather an “enabler” of top performance.

As mentioned earlier, the first step is to understand what the barrier is and address it. That may mean refresher training, new skill training, or clarity and rationalization for a new requirement. And it also means understanding the root cause for the agent “not wanting to.”

Five “Must Haves” When Coaching Tenured Contact Center Agents

1. Respect

Many customer service organizations have five generations working in their contact centers today. It is natural that tensions are mounting.

A tenured customer service agent may be reporting to a team leader who is decades younger. The resentment and lack of trust that can materialize from this dynamic limits collaboration, sparks emotional conflict, and lowers team performance.

However, best-in-class management teams see it as an opportunity to merge the seasoned experience of its older team members with the fresh perspective of its younger ones.

The role of the Coach is not a “boss” but rather an “enabler” of top performance. Coaches need to check their egos and acknowledge the expertise of those they coach.

2. Common Ground

The agent and the Coach may not share the same viewpoint or ideas about how to achieve something. However, it is possible to arrive at some common goals, e.g., doing well on the quality assessment, getting more positive customer surveys, handling more calls, reducing errors, or reducing stress.

If there is flexibility in how to achieve the goals, then allow the agent to design their own course of action. Bring together their ideas, provide positive feedback and let them know you appreciate their perspective.

If there is no flexibility, then explaining how the required behavior will enable the agent to achieve the desired outcome is vital. It needs to make sense and align with shared goals.

It is inevitable that different views and opinions will come to the forefront, and conflict may arise. That’s all right — as long as you keep bringing the conversation back to the idea that it is all about helping the agent deliver a better experience.

3. A Change of Scenery

Nothing is more exciting to a tenured agent than the opportunity to do something different – even if for a short time.

When choosing someone for a special project, be careful not to fall back on stereotypes that will restrict a tenured agent from participating.

Such stereotypes may include what you do or do not know about them, what you believe they do or do not know, what they are or are not interested in, or how they may or may not be able to contribute.

These agents have been with your organization for a while, and there will be plenty of assumptions and perceptions to cloud your judgment.

4. An Opportunity to Share Their Expertise

There isn’t a single contact center organization that has too much coaching!

That’s why many top organizations have embraced formal mentoring programs where tenured customer service agents support new hires or other agents who may be struggling.

This is a great way to acknowledge and demonstrate appreciation for tenured agents’ skills, experience, and knowledge.

An hour or two off the phones once a week/month to support another up-and-coming customer service agent can make all the difference to a tenured agent, helping them to feel respected and valued.

Research shows that mentorship programs, however simple or complex, not only support agent development but also increase both individual involvement and collective motivation.

5. A Chance to Contribute to Change

Nothing frustrates a tenured customer service agent more than constant change. In fact, it frustrates everyone!

The easiest way to engage tenured agents in accepting change is to invite them to participate in defining what that “change” looks like — Designing a new procedure? Developing new quality assurance criteria? Looking at a new furniture layout?

Whatever the “change” is, look for opportunities for your most seasoned agents to contribute their experience and ideas.

Worse case, they will spend a few unproductive hours off the phones (and thank you for it!) Best case, they will lend their considerable experience to improve things and become promoters of change throughout your organization.

Changing the Perception of Coaching

Most contact center managers and quality analysts have grown up in the organization, moving their way up from a front-line agent position.

Given this, they know what needs to be done and often feel that their role is to point out when an agent fails to do things correctly. They provide feedback by telling.

“The Leader as Coach” by Hernina Ibarra and Anne Scoular, describes the change needed in contact centers today:

“Rapid, constant, and disruptive change is now the norm, and what succeeded in the past is no longer a guide to what will succeed in the future. Twenty-first-century managers simply don’t (and can’t!) have all the right answers. To cope with this new reality, companies are moving away from traditional command-and-control practices and toward something very different: a model in which managers give support and guidance rather than instructions, and employees learn how to adapt to constantly changing environments in ways that unleash fresh energy, innovation, and commitment. The role of the manager, in short, is becoming that of a coach.”

By allowing agents to be guided to the correct answer, solution, or behavior, they have greater control over their ability to self-manage.

This approach doesn’t rely on the fact that the coach has the correct answer but rather that the coach and the agent will discover the answer together. I call this “Self-Directed Coaching,” which works well with agents with little or a lot of experience.

To be successful, we also need to address the perception that the Team Lead/Supervisor or QA Analyst is ‘superior’ to the front-line agent.

The best reality is one where everyone understands that they are working on behalf of the agent, helping them elevate their performance – just as we see coaches supporting athletes in the sporting world.

The Impact of Work-from-Home

Whether the agent is a seasoned professional or just out of new hire training, the dynamic of QA and Coaching changes when the agent works from home. Historically, most coaching in a contact center takes place “on the fly.” A quick recommendation for improvement as you walk by. A brief pat on the back for a problem well-handled.

These timely fly-by moments are vital to engaging agents and providing just-in-time feedback no matter the agents’ level of performance. For at-home agents, check-ins must be very deliberately added into a coach’s daily routine. Check-ins need to be timely and frequent — but fast, like a well-timed chat message.

Pre-planned check-ins are also helpful, particularly if your contact center is tightly scheduled. The key to QA success is delivering feedback and coaching as soon as possible after the interaction. That is because the agent will remember the interaction and won’t be repeating bad habits.

Where you might have just dropped by their desk in the contact center, try scheduling a five or ten minute phone call. Review yesterday’s results and help agents identify what they will do differently today.

Conclusion

No one hopes to join an organization and be in the same role for years. Historically contact center growth has created an environment where there is lots of room for upward movement – however, that is quickly changing.

With fewer management and support roles, we must make it okay (even admirable) to be a successful front-line contact center agent for 10+ years.

We need to consciously celebrate our front-line agents, in equal measure to our coaches and team leads, in a meaningful way. Agents with tenure bring something special to the table – experience –that should be nurtured, shared, recognized, and applauded.

We’ve all been there. The landline rings unexpectedly or an Unknown Number flashes on your screen and — before you know it — you’re listening to somebody’s sales pitch for a product you don’t need.

Insurance claims, home insulation, car accidents that never happened — the thought of receiving these cold calls could send shivers down anyone’s spine. In fact, only 2% are said to be successful.

Immediately, your finger hovers over the “end call” button. While this isn’t a position many people want to find themselves in, our distaste for so-called “cold calls” is predominately down to the way they’re conducted.

So, is cold calling a dated sales tactic? Or that it needs some added heat?

A Chilly Reception

But what exactly is cold calling? In most cases, the term describes an attempt to solicit business from a potential customer, typically via a phone call, who may or may not know about the company that’s calling.

Cold calling’s effectiveness is often debated. According to marketer Charlie Cook, 98% of cold calls do not result in a successful sale. However, Sales Insights Lab reports that 41.2% of sales professionals consider their telephone as one of the most important sales tools at their disposal.

There are other factors affecting cold calling’s validity. Over the past two years, as much of the country has worked from home, many have reported a rise in the number of unwanted calls they receive.

And, unfortunately, many calls are ingenuine. As many as 59.49 million Americans (23%) report having lost money as a result of phone scams in the past 12 months — up from 56 million in 2020.

While this category of nuisance calls — often including those false insurance claims — is not the same as a genuine telesales tactic. The two are often lumbered into the same boat, damaging the reputation of authentic sales teams.

Hanging Up

The United States has legislation in place to prevent the public from being harassed by cold callers. Cold callers may only call their targets at home between 8:00am and 9:00pm. However, these time restrictions do not apply if the recipient is already a customer of the firm or if they’ve given the firm permission to call at other times. Cold callers may call at work at any time.

Cold callers must also say who’s calling and why. They must promptly state their names, their firms’ names, addresses or telephone numbers, and that the purpose of the call is to sell a product or service.

Saying No is also an option. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission state that cold callers must put their targets on the National Do Not Call Registry if asked, preventing the caller from contacting that individual again.

Canada follows a similar process, with a National Do Not Call List that is designed to reduce the number of unwanted telemarketing calls and faxes Canadian consumers receive. If a consumer asks not to be contacted, the telemarketer must add their name and number to their own internal do not call list within 14 days.

While many would hope for this result, cold callers must tell the truth. People selling products, (including insurance policies and securities) and services, must outline the exact details of what they are selling. If sellers and brokers lie about any important aspect of what they are offering they violate the many laws governing these practices.

Turn up the Heat

With all this in mind, it’s easy to see why cold calling receives a bad reputation, and why some businesses may consider scrapping the sales technique altogether. However, it’s fairer to say that cold calling as it is most commonly thought of is dead — but calling isn’t.

Before picking up the phone, call centers need to make sure they have the right prospect lists. Having access to the right data, in this case the correct people to contact, is vital.

It sounds simple, but most bad customer experiences stem from being offered something that’s irrelevant. Calling the wrong people can actively damage a business, so the quality of your prospect list is crucial.

And having the wrong data won’t only spoil relationships. IBM has estimated that bad data costs the U.S. economy around $3.1 trillion dollars each year. Additional research from Experian also found that bad data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88% of American companies, with the average company losing around 12% of its total revenue.

Businesses wanting to enhance their prospect lists have several possibilities. First, it’s helpful to do something that may seem counterintuitive — begin with existing customers.

Depending on a business’s line of work, particularly if it’s project-driven, it might see each contract it secures as a one-off or occasional activity.

But in fact, using a warm lead provides the opportunity to contact businesses that are relevant and more likely to enlist in your services again.

Similarly, revisiting past customers can also improve call success rates. It’s easy to let good contacts slide over time, and whether your address book is a fully-fledged CRM system or something more ad hoc, never forget that your old contacts are gold.

In addition to building a good prospect list, optimizing call center data also means understanding the information received via the call center metrics dashboard.

Core metrics to master include abandonment time, the percentage of callers that get frustrated with waiting for answers and hang up, and average and maximum wait times for inbound calls to be answered.

Call center managers should also analyze data for the average communication time for inbound and outbound calls, in order to track how long it takes operators to get the outcomes they seek.

When looking at call resolution rates, or calls that can be deemed a success, anything over 90% is considered optimal. If a business is dipping below 70%, it needs to improve, and below 40% requires immediate action.

Ditch Direct Dialing

Once a call center has its list of prospects in place, it’s time to do something controversial: ditch the traditional direct dial telephone calling.

That’s because this old method of cold calling is dead, and companies need to streamline the way they make calls and manage their outcomes.

The arrival of the cloud-based call center means that today’s business leaders can unlock a scalable, flexible environment for customer experience and support.

At the same time, by conducting calls hosted from the cloud, companies have more freedom to manage and control all activities in a central environment.

But what does taking call center activity to the cloud really mean? A cloud-based call center software allows sales teams to make calls more efficiently than with a simple business phone solution. Because voice-based communication services are hosted off-premise, opting for a cloud software delivers multiple benefits to call centers.

First, using cloud software allows call center managers to store infinite data on customer interactions in a safe and compliant manner, so it’s easy to access in-depth insights into call patterns and outcomes. It’s also possible to combine the software with CRM systems for a better overview of the customer journey.

Secondly, taking call center software to the cloud helps make businesses more scalable. Unlike the added complexities of using fixed lines, call center managers can easily add or reduce access to the software when necessary. Like during periods where customer support or sales opportunities, and staffing needs, are greater, such as Christmastime.

And, fundamentally, using cloud-based software improves the customer experience. In addition to understanding consumer behaviors with better data analytics, cloud software can help call center operators feel closer to their customers.

When calling a prospect for the first time, using a number close to theirs always achieves better results. Using cloud call system means that call centers can make use of international numbers, wherever their operators are located.

While most customers don’t welcome an unwarranted sales pitch from a shady phone number, cold calling isn’t dead. The traditional method of telemarketing is no longer — now businesses can use enhanced data analytics and optimized call center software to bring some much-needed heat to their cold calling tactics.