Coaching, Reducing Friction Among Top Contact Center Priorities

Most contact centers say they’ll invest in coaching, training, quality monitoring, and dashboards this year. And reducing customer effort, employing automation, and improving business intelligence via voice of the customer initiatives are among their top priorities. This all according to the Contact Center Priorities for 2018 report published by Customer Contact Week.

Sixty-one percent of those surveyed indicated coaching is an investment priority for them this year. Training came in a 58 percent, and quality monitoring and management, and dashboards tied for third at 54 percent. Scheduling and forecasting, workforce management, interaction recording and monitoring, recruiting, and learning management systems and knowledge management also made the list – in that order.

Meanwhile 39 percent of those noted in the above-noted study talked about their desire to reduce the effort their customers have to expend to get what they want. Thirty-seven expressed plans to focus on automation via things like chatbots, which they talked about relative to driving engagement. Improving business intelligence via better voice of the customer efforts got a 34 percent take rate. Customer journey mapping, improving the agent experience, personalization, and technology upgrades were other key priorities noted.

Coaching and training can be valuable tools to help contact centers get the optimal value from their human resources – their biggest cost. Plus, with the right coaching and training, agents are better positioned to deliver good customer experiences.

Reducing customer friction – noted in the study as the top priority this year – has been a popular theme in customer service recently. Customers are more demanding than ever, and they’re typically unwilling (or at least unhappy) to jump through a lot of hoops to get what they want. So some businesses are adopting omnichannel solutions so they can interact with organizations using the tools of their choice, and so they won’t have to repeat themselves if the problem isn’t solved during the initial contact.

Edited by Maurice Nagle