agents. Hold times increased, as did frustration and anxiety among customers, human agents and businesses. “Hearing ‘We’re experiencing unexpectedly high call volumes’ is not comforting for those needing immediate assistance,” Kieswetter advised. An ICMI-commissioned report released by NICE this spring, meanwhile, states that while the pandemic continues to agitate personnel, “managing customer interactions and continually improving customer satisfaction remains a critical challenge and places agent experience high on the list of contact center leaders’ strategic priorities.” ICMI works with contact centers to accomplish desired outcomes and prepare them for the future. NICE is a software provider that works to remove the friction between companies and consumers, creating experiences that build brand loyalty. The report notes an increase of callers occurred at the same time as the massive migration from offices to homes. This was largely driven by the shift in retail sales to online channels and the subsequent increase in the volume of B2C interactions. Much of the transition required a great deal of IT work and training to keep agents connected to office servers. The merger of these phenomena resulted in a third of contact center agents resigning during the past year. Change, Flexibility Prior to the pandemic, contact centers followed the demands put on them. Each center mapped out its busiest times and knew when calls were slack. According to the ICMI report, change and flexibility will be dominant themes within every contact center moving forward. This includes adding the tools necessary to become more automated and using emerging innovations such as conversational intelligence. Through these tools, agents will be able to focus more on complex customer challenges. Companies still will need to ensure all contact center employees have access to company infrastructure and technology platforms – the servers – to allow them to retrieve data and customer information without jeopardizing IT security. However, what the study found is that only 17 percent of respondents said their contact center agents could switch seamlessly among various channels without needing to repopulate customers’ information in each new channel. While adding channels widens customers’ choices of how they reach an agent or access a knowledge base, requiring agents to serve customers using multiple, disconnected channels slows response times, creates confusion and drives up the cost to serve often-frustrated customers, according to the report. The result is more stress and unhappier agents, which could point to the large number of resignations during the past year. Upgrading the contact center with artificial intelligence, automation and security tools elevates agent productivity and shortens hold times and resolves issues faster to increase customer satisfaction. However, implementation of these tools doesn’t occur in a silo. Collaboration between human agents and technology is critical, as it elevates productivity and scale. For example, ICMI suggests virtual agents are an efficient way to handle repetitive calls, such as placing orders, entering payment information or changing an address for an order. By removing the mundane, repetitive, tier 1 customer service cases from the task sheet of human agents, you allow the humans to focus on more complex issues that need human interaction or creative problem solving. 35 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com
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