Workable Solutions to Contact Center Capacity Shortfalls (Q&A)

The shift to digital channels is being driven by consumers, and businesses are responding—not the other way around. This trend can be traced back to the emergence of mobile devices as the primary way consumers connect with organizations they do business with. It also tracks closely with the arrival of millennials and Gen Z into the workforce and as consumers. These were the first digital natives, and their preferences forced businesses to open the gates to new digital and messaging channels.

These new workers/consumers, armed with mobile devices, have shown an inclination to do their own research online before reaching for a live agent for customer support. They are more open to self-service than previous generations, and more willing to use automation as a first step. But it is also important to remember that voice isn’t going away. It is morphing into a channel used for more complicated problems or for connections that really benefit from a human-to-human conversation, for example those with a high-value customer.

When customers are more engaged in doing their own prep work before they even ask for help, the agent won’t be asked to handle the simple questions anymore. They are too valuable of a resource to spend time reciting account balances or pointing people to online resources. Instead, their roles shift to advocates or concierges who are there to shepherd customers through more complicated processes. If automation is taking care of the easy questions, that leaves the more complex and thorny issues for the agent to tackle. As problem solvers, they need training in a different mix of skills than traditional call handling required. For example, they need visibility into the customer’s activities on digital channels and the ability to quickly get up to speed on issues that have already been started in automated systems, and they need to be able to explain more complex issues to customers who may be confused or unhappy.

Digital channels actually make soft skills like empathy and savvy communication more important. This also means that measuring people’s performance based on call duration and other time-based metrics won’t be as successful in identifying good performance, because complex calls take longer and consume more resources.

One positive result of the shift to remote agents is that organizations are no longer tied to specific geographic locations to fill their labor pipelines. They can seek out a more diverse workforce with a different mix of skills and talents than if everyone had to be within driving distance of a physical contact center.

Also, we predict that by 2024, two-thirds of contact centers will have increased their budgets for training and coaching due to the rigors of managing work-from-home agents and the increasing complexity of agented interactions. When people are remote, they need training and support to take up the slack created by the loss of team building, direct collaboration and sharing of experiences and best practices among peers. More detailed training and career pathing can be a strong incentive in attracting new workers and keeping the best ones already on staff.

Another area organizations should focus on is the relationship between agents and supervisors. Supervisors have lost the direct connections they count on to manage performance. And agents put a lot of emphasis on their supervisor relationships when they decide to stay or leave. So paying attention to the resources managers have to coordinate with team members and to motivate and incent agents is an important and often overlooked way to tackle attrition and solidify the workforce downstream of supervisors.

Contact centers are being asked to take on more responsibility for the long-term customer relationship, not just each individual interaction. That means having a deeper awareness of the context surrounding each customer, which implies a greater reliance on tools that provide accurate data. Some tools funnel data to the agent and her desktop, often in real time. Others move it backwards, out of the contact center, to be analyzed by sales and marketing teams to understand what customers really want and need. So that puts tools like agent guidance or agent assistance at the top of many lists.

The common element in a lot of the new tools is often an underlying layer of artificial intelligence (AI) providing many more features. AI is changing a lot about how agents are managed. For example, it can be used as part of quality evaluations, expanding the pool of evaluated recordings from a few randomly selected calls to 100% evaluations. That’s a sea change for operations, creating both fairer evaluations and greater insight for managers. AI is also powering new knowledge management functions that find useful information buried in huge, often unstructured data resources. It is speeding time-to-resolution for customer problems and aiding new and ongoing agent training.

Generally, we’re seeing improvements in contact center tools across the board, largely driven by advances in the underlying platforms: first moving them to the cloud, and then, adding AI and workflow automation as enablers and improvers of existing operational tools.

The first area to tackle is that supervisor/agent relationship. Both sides need help and resources to adapt to the shifts in how we engage with customers and to new modes of remote or hybrid working. After that, organizations should look closely at the kinds of metrics they use to define success in their centers. Contact centers are very good at tallying up the things they do: counting hold times, minutes spent on calls, after call work and so on. But those metrics don’t tell people outside the contact center how well the center’s activities line up with and support overall goals related to revenue. Centers should be tracking how well agents perform at increasing customer value, loyalty and longevity, as a start. Those metrics reflect the outcomes an organization is aiming for, rather than the activities that are happening. Both are important, but outcomes are often overlooked.

And when thinking about capacity shortfalls, organizations should look hard at the way human work and automation are combined. They should complement each other, not get in each other’s way. The more complex the agents’ jobs become, the more they’ll need the help from automated tools that suggest what actions to take during a call, or that identify potential issues that impact how an agent handles a customer. Automation is also useful in building processes that knit together different parts of the organization—front office and back office, for example. Finding the right balance for deploying automation alongside human labor will be a challenge for everyone. The right mix will be unique to each vertical market and type of customer.