Question: I’ve heard a lot about digital customer service solutions. Isn’t this just another way of saying that it’s omni-channel? Answer: Digital customer service (DCS) consists of more than adding digital servicing channels to contact centers, which has slowly been happening for years. It’s about meeting customers in their channel (or channels) of choice and [...]
Contact Center WFO Solutions In the Future The contact center WFO suite market has performed well in both good and challenging economic times. It has outperformed most other contact center IT segments during economic slowdowns and recessions because of its ability to reduce operating costs while improving the customer experience and enhancing agent engagement. It [...]
Question: Our back-office operations utilize robotic process automation, but I’m not sure how we’d use it in the contact center. Is there a different application for contact centers? Answer: Robotic process automation (RPA) solutions most commonly used in back-office environments are unattended RPA applications. This type of RPA performs end-to-end automation of high-volume transaction-based activities [...]
Pandemic Speeds Adoption of IA Interaction analytics (IA) is a highly valuable application for contact centers, with even higher potential for making major contributions to other enterprise departments. IA can be used to identify customers’ needs and wants, and when these insights are incorporated into the operating systems of business units, can help substantially improve [...]
Question: How does speech analytics perform trend analysis? Isn’t it just counting how often words are used? Answer: Trend analysis in interaction (speech and text) analytics solutions provides deeper insights than word count frequency. At its most basic, trend analysis is designed to allow users to define “things” they know to look for in voice [...]
Developing a Contact Center Work-At-Home Program While many contact centers, particularly the large ones, had disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans in place before the pandemic hit, even if they were rarely tested and updated, surprisingly few included the option of having employees work from home for an extended period of time. And [...]
WFO Trends in 2020 2019 was the year of artificial intelligence (AI), automation and analytics, a trend that has continued in 2020 and into the foreseeable future, despite the pandemic. Vendors are making large research and development (R&D) investments in these product areas, and end users are eager to realize the proven benefits from automation [...]
Question: Our contact center agents are working from home due to COVID-19 and many want to make it a permanent move. What technology will help us manage this shift? Answer: Transitioning to contact center as a service (CCaaS) infrastructure solutions will help provide flexibility for “hybrid” in-office/at-home contact centers, which are expected to be part [...]
Question: I have heard about artificial intelligence (AI) being used in workforce management (WFM) solutions. How much historical data is needed for AI to improve forecast accuracy? Answer: Not surprisingly, the more data you have the more accurate the findings. AI-enabled WFM solutions leverage machine learning (ML), an AI technology that is effective at finding [...]
Using IA and CJA to Improve CX During the past few months, we’ve published a series of newsletter blogs, columns and white papers to help executives and contact center leaders manage through the coronavirus pandemic. This month, we’re addressing an issue that will return to importance, once economies reopen and the business world returns to [...]
Question: How should agents handle calls when customers are sharing their fears and concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic – or other personal issues, for that matter? Answer: Although the current COVID-19 pandemic is different from anything we’ve experienced and worked through to date, fundamental contact handling communication or “soft” skills that have been around for [...]
Managing Contact Centers Through the COVID-19 Pandemic This is DMG’s second column on the COVID-19 pandemic. The first one is available here. DMG is not providing medical or legal advice; all medical questions should be referred to your doctor and legal issues addressed to your lawyers. Here is the link to the US CDC site [...]
2020 Contact Center Investment Priorities DMG’s annual survey of contact center investment priorities for the year has confirmed the anecdotal data we’ve been hearing from companies. 2020 is looking to be an outstanding year for contact center investments. As it’s difficult to get enterprise executives and managers to participate in any kind of a survey, [...]
Question: We are planning to include cloud-based contact center infrastructure vendors in our RFP process for the first time. What are some high-level considerations we should keep in mind as we evaluate these solutions? Answer: For most companies, putting contact center systems and applications in the cloud, whether public or private, is the way to [...]
