Changing Customer Preferences Changing Contact Center Operations

In some aspects of business, little changes. Good bookkeeping practices from 1950 are still good bookkeeping practices. The fundamentals of sales – identifying and meeting a customer’s needs – have also changed very little. The call center, however, is not one of the operations that remains unchanged. For starters, there are fewer calls than there used to be. For another, customer behavior has changed in recent years, and the contact center must adapt to it.

Omnichannel contact center technology company Noble Solutions recently conducted a contact center market survey to explore changes in customer behaviors in the past year and to examine the impact of these changes on the industry. The study asked call center management professionals what changes they have perceived. The changes identified included an increase in self-service, a shift in preferred communication channels, changes to peak service times, a rise in the relevance of multi-skilled advisors, and modifications to agent training methods.

Contact centers are learning how to navigate the new landscape, such as the increasing desire amongst consumers for omnichannel contact, or using interchangeable channels to communicate, whether for ongoing conversations or a one-off request. Automation such as IVR and chatbots provide benefits to customers and contact centers, speeding service delivery whilst removing routine tasks from agent queues, so they can handle more complex issues. Increasingly, customers are shifting the picture when it comes to the times they are demanding service.

“We have been surprised by the unusual times that their customers are communicating,” wrote one respondent. “Where our peak traffic used to come between 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, volume has moved to more self-serve behavior, with more requests received overnight and between 1:00 am and 3:00 am. We have seen a definite shift to more 24/7 demand and on more non-voice channels.”

To meet these changing needs, workforce management has been become critical to forecasting for changing traffic peaks and helping centers make sure they have the right people in place at the right time to answer customer enquiries. Employee engagement is a critical need in the shift to remote working, and many centers are showing an increased interest in gamification tools to keep agents up-to-date on new information and connected with their team and their goals.

Edited by Maurice Nagle