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Services for Technology Vendors
We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.
The pandemic laid bare the tenuous relationship between many contact centers and their agents. The abrupt shift to remote work was just one component of the changes still under way. The past four years have also seen enterprises reckoning with questions about how to hire, what to pay their employees, what skills are needed and how an avalanche of new technology will change their operations.
Agents are critically important in two ways. First, they represent the most direct interaction with customers any business will have and so are a point of great risk and opportunity at all times. Second, they are the most expensive ongoing component of center operations and so must factor into any discussion of technology deployment that touches their day-to-day work. In the next few years, both software providers and contact center buyers will need to reevaluate how technology impacts agents, including their productivity, engagement, skills and performance.
Managers should be thinking about policy and technology changes now while we’re still in the early stages of an industrywide transformation. We’re experiencing a shift in how agents are sourced and trained, how they work with automated systems and how they approach interactions that are more complex and unique than in years past. Anticipating the consequences of these shifts allows managers to make key decisions about what behaviors and best practices they value and will put resources behind. Meanwhile, providers will be challenged to develop tools that help agents and managers make sense of the bewildering array of information sources and action-options with which they work.
With these challenges in mind, here are five ways the agent environment will change along with the technology either in development or currently available to help centers cope. It is important to note that sometimes the technology is itself the change that needs to be responded to, and the agent's environment is downstream of that.
Some of the new criteria should be related to the longer-term outcomes of agent activity. Agents often hit their performance KPIs of speed and volume without having a clear sense of whether interactions produce positive outcomes for the company as a whole. More and better data suggests that managers may be able to create new KPIs that reflect agent impact on customer value, loyalty and advocacy. This, in turn, may produce downstream effects in reduced agent attrition, or even highlight unrealized skills among unrecognized agents. Once agents are recognized for skills related to generating revenue or increasing sales, new ways to motivate performance will surely emerge, along with a desire to spread knowledge about those skills among the wider agent pool. By 2027, we assert that three-quarters of organizations will automatically evaluate data to capture all sources of value an employee contributes to customer value and loyalty.
Software providers have been rapidly adding technology to their offerings that will directly impact agent management. For the most part, the technology has been developed in advance of the actual agent-related use cases. Examples include generative AI that leads to next-best-action guidance and conversational chatbots that reduce volume but ratchet up interaction complexity. Providers are starting to better map their innovations to those use cases, increasingly highlighting the specific cost savings derived from new features and encouraging their buyers to explore a broader palette of KPIs for agent performance.
For their part, buyers need to think about how they will maintain cost controls and optimized operations during an extended transformational period. It is particularly important for contact center leadership to consider how the technology they add in the short term will impact their workforces in the long term. This is especially true for ubiquitous platform technology like AI and knowledge management. Providers and buyers need to jointly connect these technology shifts to their very real downstream effects and develop business cases for technology enhancements that directly address ongoing business concerns about managing labor costs.
Regards,
Keith Dawson
Keith Dawson leads the software research and advisory in the Customer Experience (CX) expertise at ISG Software Research, covering applications that facilitate engagement to optimize customer-facing processes. His coverage areas include agent management, contact center, customer experience management, field service, intelligent self-service, voice of the customer and related software to support customer experiences.
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