The contact center industry is reexamining how organizations engage with contact center agents. One thing that we learned from the forced movement to work-from-home was that organizations have to provide agents with appropriate tools to collaborate and communicate with peers and supervisors as well as workers in the back office who participate in all sorts of customer-facing or customer-adjacent processes. It is also important to provide supervisors with visibility into agent activity. That...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
Field service is a segment of customer experience that is dominated by two elements: the complexity of the issues handled, and the high cost of providing on-site services. It is recognized as a critical component of the service experience, especially when managing the condition of high-precision equipment in the medical, manufacturing and utility industries. It is also a high-risk moment in the customer life cycle. Consumers often experience the process as a series of disconnected visits and...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
At Enterprise Connect in March, Amazon announced new functionality in its cloud contact center platform, Amazon Connect. The company is now including a full Workforce Optimization component, which includes built-in forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling capabilities. It's no surprise that Amazon is adding these capabilities, as WFO has become a core component of a complete CCaaS platform.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center
Contact centers are undergoing a radical reshuffling of the workforce, partly because the pandemic shifted agents to remote work. But the trends were in place to reorganize the world of work long before the pandemic. Digital contact channels, which are gaining in popularity, require workers that are better informed and capable of handling more complex and interdependent interactions and processes. That’s changing the nature of training, management and even process design between departments.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management
Customer Service and Support (CSS) software is about more than case tracking and trouble tickets. Many organizations view the service call as an opportunity to solidify a positive customer relationship and perhaps enhance the loyalty and value of the customer. That has propelled interest in the emphasis on workflows and automation that now/currently drives CSS, particularly when it comes to managing self-service and field service, and the ability to provide agents with contextually relevant...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
Although the bulk of contact center seats are still served by on-premises equipment, there appears to be a consensus that the cloud is better suited to delivering a successful, omnichannel customer experience, and that most new contact center deployments will be run on cloud-computing platforms.
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Topics:
Contact Center,
CCaaS
Today’s contact center agents find themselves handling increasingly more complex interactions due to changes in consumer demand, advances in self-service and the proliferation of digital contact channels. This added complexity requires continuous agent support for successful customer experience outcomes. Intelligent software can reduce agent workload and improve customer interactions by picking up customer cues.
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Topics:
Contact Center,
AI,
Customer Experience Management
The technology underpinning customer experience (CX) is a hodgepodge of tools that have been developed for niche use cases and then expanded to fill broader roles. Examples include the old (CRM, help desk software and speech analytics) and the new (customer data platforms and conversational AI). This is because CX is a set of very specialized processes that happen in different parts of the enterprise, managed by people who often do not connect with peers handling related processes....
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Marketing,
Marketing Performance Management,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
Product Information Management,
Digital Marketing,
agent management,
intelligent marketing,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
Conversational Marketing,
Digital Experience Platform,
customer service and support
In a previous Analyst Perspective, we discussed some of the big-picture trends that are bringing cost control back as a core driver of contact center operations. In this report we will tackle some of the practical ramifications: how those trends affect decision-making and operations.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
Contact centers have always been very cost-centric and attuned to the kinds of constraints that they have to operate in, but many organizations were diverted from that kind of focus when the pandemic first hit. In 2020, there was a sudden need for new tools and equipment just to keep centers running, and the costs involved in enabling agents to work from home — equipping them and their supervisors with the tools they needed to collaborate and stay in sync — were unavoidable.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support