Call Center Management Featured Article
Contact Center Show Season Offers Opportunities to Gain New Ideas
While contact centers sometimes appear to be the department where time stops (after all, what changes about an agent with a headset? And customers are people, and people never change…right?) The truth is that it’s one of the most dynamic functions in the company. Customer preferences and expectations DO change, and companies that carry out operations like it’s 1999 are going to find themselves far behind their competitors, who have taken the time and spent the money to build out an omnichannel support center focused around a great customer journey.
Seeing new contact center technologies in action is critical for companies that want to continue to meet their customers’ needs in 2016 and beyond. Questions you need ask yourself are:
- Are you offering your customers the channels they expect to use, such as mobile app, chatbot or social media? Your competitors probably are.
- Are you managing your workforce in a way that increases employee engagement? A revolving-door employment scenario in the contact center is expensive and means you never really have any highly trained and experienced agents. Don’t your customers deserve better than a constant stream of newbies who learned to pronounce the names of the company’s products last week?
- Do you have full visibility into your contact center operations, including real-time metrics and alerts that help you understand when you’re out of adherence and struggling to keep wait times low for customers? Do you have a solution that can tell you what you’re doing wrong without hours of manual effort?
The good news is that it is contact center industry trade show season, and some of the latest and greatest contact center enablement technologies will be on display. While ICMI is finished, the next show to kick off will be Call Center Week 2016 in Las Vegas, which will be held at the Mirage Resort on June 27 – July 1. A number of contact center innovators will be participating, including workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert), which will be at Booth 616.
As always, there are several intriguing master classes on the itinerary, including “Performance Management: It Takes a Skilled Workforce to Reach the High Hanging Fruit” and “Why the Customer Experience Matters and What You Can Do About It.”
The 2016 Workshop schedule includes sessions entitled “From Call Center to Customer Engagement Center: Leading through Change” and “Quality Metrics: Unveiling the Strategic Insights for your Business.”
Las Vegas is also home to Zappos, a company Monet has referenced in numerous blogs as an example of creative, above-and-beyond customer service, according to Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of Monet Software, so it’s fitting that one of Call Center Week’s keynote addresses will be delivered by the company’s “Culture Evangelist,” Jon Wolske. A tour of the Zappos facility will also be available so contact centers looking for inspiration from a customer support leader can gain valuable insight into revamping their processes.
More detailed information about Call Center Week 2016 may be found here.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi