Our personal and professional lives have blurred, with the unprecedented shift to remote and hybrid work. As work was pushed outside the boundaries of employees' regular work lives, businesses have needed to adjust to new ways of delivering better customer experiences. Organizations extended their customer engagement operations far beyond the normal boundaries of the contact center as they grappled with increased expectations for reliable, smooth and empatheticconnections. This change in workflow and lifestyle has forced all customer-focused operations to become more agile, driven by a revaluation and reinvestmentin technology built for remote and global accessibility. The result: with nearly all operations moving to the cloud, the need for legacy, on-premise customer service solutions has just about disappeared, delivering much more flexibility to this crucial business function.
Now is the time for globally accessible contact centers
Reimagining customer experiences has been critical to better achieve meaningful interactions for all points of contact with clients. As every business and industry moved to the cloud, customers expected 24x7 availability, regardless of the operation, products and services. And, if they didn’t experience this, customers would move onto competitors that went out of their way to meet this demand.
As businesses adapted to the change in communications and customer expectations, contact center operations were forced to harness existing toolsor find new solutions that would provide better options to meet customer expectations. These included:
- Remote supportability and accessibility for customers and workers
- Data accessibility for all applications inside and adjacent to the contact center
The most nimble and productive contact center operations are those that have a foundation built for work-from-anywhere. Most operations used cloud-based products and services or were preconfigured with remote accessibility as part of the foundation.
Working from anywhere means that every user needed to have easy access to the host system. However, remote accessibility was often complicated with different issues, such as licensing concerns, telco accessibility and limited voice connectivity.
Easy accessibility is an important consideration as operations map out both a short-term and long-term solution in providing a work-from-anywhere foundation for the workforce.
Contact center cloud adoption in a digital world
As the pandemic shifted options for connecting, customers easily transitioned communications pathways that blended in with their everyday lives such as texting, social media, and more. With social media in particular, the demand for real-time, always-on information has become the standard.
A benefit of most cloud-based solutions, and what drives brand loyalty, is this 24x7 access. The growing use of Artificial Intelligence is helping operations deliver on this need. The goal of AI is far beyond automating the customer experience, but rather, allowing more accessibility to customers where workforce customer care representatives may not be available. AI is a great pathway for enhancing the customer experience, especially if the Great Resignation leaves teams understaffed.
Easy access to data - such as CRM, BI and analytics and insight on external applications - is essential to great customer experience. Having a plug-n-play option to bring data together should be a primary feature with any contact center solution. In fact, today, most applications support data accessibility with Rest API options. This can simplify the process for access, while also ensuring mandatory security.
Company culture and the agent experience
As operations adjust to work-from-anywhere standards, many organizations have focused more closely on how company culture directly impacts employee retention.
Staffing has always been the top issue with service-driven industry businesses and is a standard scorecard most contact center operations struggle with on a regular basis. Keeping employees happy and engaged can fundamentally provide incredible value for all employers and drive retention.
In addition to the base KPI metrics most operations historically utilize, there has been a refreshed focus on employee-impacting options, including workforce management applications, gamification applications, communication leader boards and overall company collaboration. Productivity, collaboration, unification, and agent engagement are becoming increasingly important parts of an organization's culture - taking its place alongside customer experience.
While employee productivity has been a cause for concern for some businesses, in the past two years, two-thirds of employers report increased productivity another study, 43% of employees said flexible working hours helped increase productivity. Emerging technologies such as Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) can further bolster employee productivity and efficiency. A common adage which has been adopted by the world of business ‘Adapt or Die’ underscores the importance of enhancing flexibility and productivity in the name of customer experience. When these tools are adapted, companies can successfully navigate the business landscape and gain a competitive advantage.
