Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Customers Going Digital Far Faster than Customer Support Departments
For companies with customer support quality that isn’t what they wish – likely to be most of them today – the problem is simply stated, though not easily solved: they are still running analog operations in a digital world. Customers, particularly younger customers, are adopting technology in a way that has outpaced adoption rates of technology in most companies. It’s easy to understand why: switching customer support technologies isn’t something you can do every six months. It can be expensive and disruptive and prone to cost overages and feature-creep (in which everyone in the organization has a pet feature they want, whether the organization needs it or not).
Research bears this out. The 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, recently released by Dimension Data (News - Alert) for the Middle East region, forecasted that non-voice traffic (digital communications) are set to rise in 85 percent of the Middle East’s contact centers within the next two years. At the same time, telephone traffic is forecast to drop in 20 percent of contact centers during the same period. Macro trends in the contact center industry have found that the global contact center industry will manage more digital interactions than voice within the next two years. How many organizations are ready for this? The answer, unfortunately, is “not very many.”
“This represents the most significant change in the contact center business in 30 years, and has profound implications for the way organizations deploy technology to deliver and manage customer service,” wrote the report’s authors. “Digital convenience is creating growth for the industry, and 95 percent of the region’s contact centers expect combined volumes across all channels to rise by the end of 2016. This shift will transform contact centers from being telephone-centric stereotypes into customer resolution centers, and change the shape of the industry forever.”
It’s important to remember that while the customer-facing functions go digital – the ability to handle customers out of a universal communications queue that integrates all channels, including chat, mobile apps, social media, video and more – the back-office functions need to as well. This means taking knowledge from each of these communications channels, including self-service, and using the information to gain actionable intelligence through analytics.
“Despite data analytics being voted the top factor to change the shape of the industry within the next five years, more than half (58 percent) of contact centers have no data analysis tools,” wrote the report’s authors. “In addition, 47 percent of the participants said their contact centers don’t share customer intelligence gathered with the rest of the business, and 47 percent of core analytic systems aren’t integrated across the organization.”
Without the knowledge gained from analytics, even the “housekeeping” functions such as scheduling, workforce management, performance management and call recording can’t reach their full potential. Scheduling happens in a vacuum, and knowledge learned from customer interactions (an unexpectedly high call volume over a particular product announcement, for example) does not make it to the scheduling function that would benefit from the insight (and put more agents into the channels where these product queries are coming in).
“The combination of technology that’s creating an omnichannel environment, the ability to analyze and act in real-time, and personalized customer service provides powerful resources for organizations to create a productive, digital customer engagement model,” wrote Dimension Data analysts. “But the
industry is massively unprepared.”
Edited by Stefania Viscusi