Viewpoints (2)

Analyst Viewpoint Contact centers in the hospitality industry are a more labor-centric business than most people realize. Agents are responsible for providing customer service on behalf of their organization to a wide variety of clients 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They employ a large workforce with a unique mix of skills and needs, and which accounts for most any center’s operating expenses. This labor force is also highly transient, which creates the need for a continuous pipeline of hiring, incubation and training. The pandemic affected every corner of the hospitality sector and led to a dramatic shift to remote and virtual work environments, forcing the entire industry to reconsider many of its conventional assumptions about its workforce. While hospitality organizations were largely successful at relocating agents from centers to remote locations and workers’ homes, doing so revealed some of the stresses that had long existed for both supervisors and agents. Issues emerged related to communications and collaboration, data security, and training and budgeting, on top of the existing structural problems of turnover and quality control. The sudden disruption in operations created an opportunity to review the underlying technologies used to manage agents, along with the processes that guide them. One outcome of the sudden shift was a need to reevaluate spending priorities. Ventana Research asserts that by 2026, 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. The old model for agent management reflected the center’s overall quest for efficiency and cost-control centered around the three core technology pillars of agent management: workforce management for scheduling, call recording for quality control and coaching, and evaluation software for performance measurement. All three are all still necessary and effective, but are no longer the be-all and end-all of agent management. A new paradigm emerged that takes a more holistic view of the agent’s role and adds to those pillars increased attention on training for a more complex and unpredictable hospitality sector. Modern centers have to address issues of real-time agent guidance, centralized applications and planning for unforeseen activities. Managers are beginning to listen to the voice of the agent, using the agent experience as another data source to understand how to better serve customers. The result is that instead of seeing the workforce as a cost sink, it’s possible to manage it as a strategic asset, and hospitality agents as brand ambassadors. New methods of managing agents are now required. As customer expectations evolve and shift to digital and multichannel communication for orders, reservations and planning leisure time, holes in the system become visible. Better security, compliance, collaboration and training tools are needed when agents work remotely. By 2025, we assert that nine in 10 organizations will have deployed agent management systems with features specifically built to provide supervisors the ability to manage and coach agents working from home. Even when they work within the center, the nature of their jobs is changing in ways that cry out for deeper training and skill development. Vendors have moved past the basic call recording, quality monitoring and coaching trifecta by developing more integrated tools for staff scheduling, measuring agent satisfaction and incorporating agent feedback into process development. Buyers in the hospitality sector need to think about their agent populations as more than “agents;” they are cross-functional workers, some of whom primarily handle voice calls, but many of whom deal with blended channels. They require a variety of skills that need to be balanced when creating schedules and planning for staffing. Buyers should look for platforms that incorporate as much of the onboarding pipeline, training/incubating, skills management and agent feedback loop as possible, in addition to the standard forecasting, scheduling and adherence features. And it is not enough to measure agents against traditional standards of efficiency that reflect how many calls or minutes they spend in each work state. Instead, consider how the work they do impacts other revenue-centric processes affecting sales and marketing teams, and how agents add value to those processes. This should provide a functionality roadmap to guide RFI and the evaluation and buying process. Looking ahead, it’s likely that the hospitality sector will be taking a more nuanced approach to hiring and keeping their agents. When agents are expected to be ambassadors, problem solvers and efficient interaction handlers, their managers need to have tools that account for the broader role responsibilities. Contact center managers and their IT colleagues—who still purchase the lion’s share of workforce management tools—are using this moment of transition to prepare their organizations for the diversely skilled workforce the hospitality industry.

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