2020 Contact Center Retrospective What an amazing year 2020 has been – never seen anything like it and hope we won’t again. But, despite all of the challenges, a lot of good things have happened, including in the world of contact centers. Below are 6 positive mega trends that emerged during the dark hours of [...]
Question: What information should we include in a job description? Answer: A job description (JD) is an important tool for defining and communicating the functions and responsibilities associated with a particular position in an organization. It also serves the very important function of compelling the hiring manager to specify and document the requirements and skills [...]
Question: Is contact center performance management something more than advanced reporting? Answer: Leading workforce optimization (WFO) and best-of-breed providers have offered contact center performance management (CCPM) applications for decades, yet they continue to be one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated applications in the contact center market. While CCPM solutions should be able to generate [...]
WFM Solutions for a more Agile Business World Change is born of necessity. The business world today is dramatically different from what it was 15 years ago, and not just because of the pandemic. The workforce has changed, management practices have changed, how we do business has changed, and customer expectations have changed. Technology must [...]
IVAs Role in Delivering a Great Service Experience Three years ago, few companies had heard of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), and fewer were willing to invest in them. Today, companies are trying to put these solutions in production as quickly as they can. (There’s nothing like a worldwide pandemic that requires people to social distance [...]
Question: What is predictive analytics and how is it being used in contact centers? Answer: Predictive analytics is playing an increasingly vital role in contact centers. It is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based capability that utilizes data mining, statistical techniques and machine learning to identify relationships, patterns and trends. Based on the captured data, a predictive [...]
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 [...]
