Engaged contact center agents are essential to the success of any customer service operation. When employees feel connected to their jobs and have meaningful goals, agent performance increases. And happy agents tend to deliver experiences that delight your customers. But disengaged agents create challenges in a customer service center. A 2021 Gartner study found that…
Maximizing workforce management efficiency through real-time data is an often-overlooked advantage for contact centers. With real-time information, you can make crucial intraday adjustments that improve your efficiency and your customer experience. There are several roles within the workforce management space, and each one is important in its own way. Making sure you fill these key…
Operating a successful contact center demands attention to a wide range of factors, from investing in your agents’ well-being and training to implementing the right tools and technology. The key to maintaining peak performance is to continuously optimize productivity and streamline operations. Whether you’re looking to implement new technologies, fine-tune your staffing strategy, or empower…
Customer experience leaders are more challenged than ever. They are under constant pressure to reduce operational overhead costs, lower recruiting, onboarding and training costs – all while exceeding customer demands and delivering exceptional customer service. When contact center managers look to decrease overhead, they think first to eliminate manual processes through automation. They also look…
Agent performance optimization isn’t a new challenge for CX leaders. Post-pandemic, distributed workforces operating in remote and hybrid environments, though, have made getting the most out of your teams a lot more complicated—and important. Add uncertain economic conditions to the mix, and the need for maximum employee output is acute. The most successful contact centers strike…
Working with virtual teams of agents in your contact center can sometimes mean you feel disconnected from them — or even worried that you aren’t able to properly manage their performance. Those concerns might be why almost half of the contact center leaders in our 2022 remote work research study told us that they’re bringing…
Let’s face it, the call center of yesteryear is not wholly relevant when looking at customer service operations today. Even the terms “call center” and “contact center” are called into question, given the images they evoke of rows of agents in cubicles lined up to fill a room. For convenience, I’ll use the term “contact…
During my career in workforce management, call avoidance was always an issue — regardless of the location of the business, the nature of the business, or the location of the agent. Call avoidance, now known as interaction avoidance, denotes the steps an agent takes to avoid handling a customer interaction. It can take time and…
When it comes to call avoidance (or, more accurately these days, interaction avoidance), you usually know it when you see it. Unless you don’t. It’s easier than you think to misjudge an agent in an interaction, so I’ve assembled examples of interaction avoidance along with actions you should take when it occurs. We’ll also look…
“Time is money” is a phrase attributed to Benjamin Franklin, first appearing in The American Instructor, a book published in 1748. For contact center managers, this phrase rings in their heads each time they create a forecast, build a schedule, or track schedule adherence. Working efficiently becomes even more important when costs are rising, agents…
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