In our sixth year of asking contact center professionals about their biggest challenges and priorities, we found out that their vision for the coming year was overshadowed by the global pandemic that has disrupted everyone and everything. As such the theme I’d pick for the year is agility. Not enough centers had it, and going… Read More »
We have the privilege of working with contact centers of many sizes, across a wide range of industries. They all have a few things in common: they want to deliver a great customer experience, meet their target metrics, operate efficiently and effectively, and use technology to their advantage. Credit unions are a bit unique in… Read More »
Cloud vendors regularly crow about their “fast and easy” delivery of advanced contact center capabilities. When their benchmark is premise-based solutions, they’ve certainly got an edge. However, contact centers still need to put themselves and their prospective vendor partners through the planning paces before signing on the dotted line to ensure there’s a good fit… Read More »
Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) – a.k.a., contingency planning, business continuity management, and business recovery planning – can weigh on CC leaders’ minds. All too often, developing plans and putting resources in place doesn’t make it to the top of the “to do” list or score a “win” in the battle of the budget…. Read More »
I’ve challenged contact centers to make 2020 the Year of the Agent. I’ve built my case around the argument that if you want to deliver a great customer experience, you first have to make sure you’re delivering a great agent experience. In the spirit of action, I’ve outlined two different assignments for you to assess… Read More »
It’s 2020: a new year, a new decade, and all kinds of opportunities to talk about perfect vision! Let’s start off this exciting year with a look at findings from our fifth annual survey. Last year’s theme was change. Our 2020 theme (or vision) is “the year of the agent,” which deviates from the industry… Read More »
For the past several years, everyone has been focusing on the customer experience. Delivering a good – if not great – customer journey is crucial for building or retaining market share. Customers expect to be treated well at every point of contact. So, it’s no surprise that the customer experience has emerged as a key… Read More »
Contact centers are awash in data. But let’s break this big bucket of data into two chunks: one about customers, and a second one about their interactions and how they are handled. In order to serve customers, centers need good, complete, up-to-date data about them. While names, addresses, contact information are starting points for a… Read More »
Despite all the excitement around contact center technology capabilities and innovation, many centers continue to fall short when it comes to getting value from their investments. Our recent Future of the Contact Center Survey showed that skepticism continues to lurk out there for new technology, such as bots and Artificial Intelligence. I’m not surprised. When… Read More »
There is a great deal of buzz in the contact center air about “bots” and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their potential to make agent-supported contacts go away. Yet for many centers, agent-handled contacts still dominate – and will for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, our Future of the CC Survey put Robotic Process Automation (RPA –… Read More »