Digital front doors of businesses require greater levels of empathy and attention be paid to contact center agent well-being and engagement.
Playvox, the leading CRM-connected omnichannel contact center provider of workforce engagement solutions, today released the findings of its 2021 Post-Pandemic Contact Center Trends analysis.
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The pandemic shifted, virtually overnight, global population shopping behaviors to online and working remotely. Contact center and agents’ roles changed to be the ‘front door of businesses.’ Agents faced staggering call volumes and overstressed customers while navigating how to work from home without traditional support mechanisms.
Four trends are reshaping contact center workforce management: Hybrid workforce, empathy, cross-sales, and cloud apps.
Based on analysis of customer data and market research, Playvox uncovered how small to mid-sized contact centers are changing to meet customers’ new post-pandemic expectations. Four key trends were identified that are reshaping contact centers, workforce management, and agent engagement. The results are published in an ebook that includes best practices for each trend on optimizing workforce management and agent experience to improve customer satisfaction.
Trend #1: Embrace the hybrid workforce
Trend #2: Empathy matters to customers and agents
Trend #3: Enhance the customer experience with cross-selling and upselling
Trend #4: Cloud-based systems are imperative for responsiveness
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“Our analysis points to what Playvox has believed from day one – that the humanization of agents is critical to increasing customer retention and satisfaction,” shared Oscar Giraldo, founder, and CEO of Playvox. “Contact centers that operationalize these four trends will be the ones that come out on top in the economic rebound.”
Trend #1: Hybrid workforces are the new normal
Contact centers are adopting a remote + hybrid + in-office model that forces companies to rethink how to equally and fairly measure, coach and reward agents, regardless of their work mode. Managers need to level the playing field for all agents by using consistent metrics and scorecards to measure agent productivity, performance standards, oversight, and recognition.
Trend #2: Empathy matters to customers and agents
Over the past twelve months, the steep increase in volume highlighted the pivotal role agents play in customer satisfaction. For many customers, happiness came from experiencing an authentic human connection with the agent. Contact centers are increasingly focused on understanding and enabling agents to do their best work by investing in supervisor training, flexible scheduling, agent coaching, and knowledge sharing.
Trend #3:Â Enhance the customer experience with cross-selling and upselling
Helping customers realize the most value from the brand’s products and services have evolved the contact center’s role. Companies see agents as a key contact point in recommending additional products and services to help customers achieve their desired outcome. Current mindsets around selling challenge the trend of expecting agents to cross-sell and upsell.
Trend #4: Cloud-based systems are imperative for responsiveness
Contact centers using on-premise, legacy systems struggled to meet the demands and omnichannel expectations of customers. The trend is driving a mass migration to digit-first, scalable, true cloud solutions built to support remote, hybrid, and in-office agents and supervisors with real-time visibility into performance, queue status, and metrics.
Playvox helps contact centers improve customer satisfaction with a robust, fully integrated workforce engagement management platform that includes workforce optimization, quality assurance, performance management, coaching, learning, voice of the customer, recognition, and agent motivation.
