Increased Expectations, Lower Execution: The State of Smart Contact Centers

Contact centers have been around long before the technology boom of the 1990s. In these early years, they provided adequate solutions to customers in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. The agents were trained, without technology, to support customers, without technology.

In one sense, the contact center has not changed. Center leaders still hope to empower agents to deliver stellar experiences for customers, fueling reductions in costs and gains in satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

With the rise in technology, something major has changed, though—the standard for customer contact experiences. Years ago, it was about meeting the customers’ lowest bar, lowest standard, just doing enough so they don’t become absolutely furious. Today, customers seek a more personalized, consultative experience. They expect agents to use the new technology to deliver a high-caliber experience across a variety of channels.

Lamentably, this doesn’t always happen. Despite the growth in expectations, the training of the agents in these centers has hardly been adjusted. While agents are still providing resolutions to customer complaints, they are expected to use new technology to get a 360-degree view of the customer, identifying who the user is and predicting their issue based on past data. The information that provides this 360-degree view, however, is often spread across a multitude of platforms, is difficult to navigate, and does more harm than good when it comes to a personalized, empathetic customer experience. Our latest market study has uncovered that “only 34% [of contact center leaders] say their platform makes it easy for leaders to add and integrate new channels, and just 45% say they can accurately forecast resourcing needs.” In other words, the technology exists for agents to help customers in a more personalized way than ever before but, because the technology is so beyond reach, it renders itself useless.

How can your contact center leverage technology in training?

1. Stick to the basics

In our “Smart Contact Centers” Market Study, Principal Analyst Brian Cantor says, “Monitoring interactions and coaching agents are essential but highly familiar tasks for which companies have had many years to perfect their strategies, processes, and systems.” The industry has spent decades perfecting aspects of the agent-customer relationship. New technologies do not make these processes obsolete. In fact, these tried-and-true methods are the stepping stone to making the technology work for your company.

Rather than throwing in the towel on antiquated methods, keep them in place and let them be enhanced by technology—not erased. Use what your agents do know to help them understand what they don’t know. It will make the adoption of smart technology much smoother.

2. Be strategic about where you devote your coaching efforts

While compliance and quality training are still vital for your contact center, there are other things to focus on as well. When analyzing industry leaders, CCW found that “37% worry they are not offering enough training on empathy and emotional skills.” Another 29% agreed there is a need to better equip agents with the training they need to use new and technologically advanced tools.

All training is important, but some areas should be dealt with more time and care than others. When helping agents get comfortable with new technology, it’s a good idea to give them additional time to get acclimated to the product and allow them to receive expert assistance so the agents, in turn, can become experts when facing customers.

3. Be smart about your “smart” solutions

Not all tech was made equally. We’ve all been there: excited to download a new product after hearing promises of all it could achieve only to find, after a couple uses, that it isn’t really as easy to use, bug-free, and simple to integrate as it seemed. It may seem obvious, but do your research before deploying smart technology. Consider inviting a few agents to share their opinions, including them in the process to help you better understand their most critical pain points and priorities. From there, you can determine how you will not only add great functionality to your contact center but so do in a way that doesn’t create a steep learning curve or additional inefficiencies for your employees.

Perhaps Cantor puts it best when he says, “If leaders do not prepare agents to capitalize on these opportunities, their companies will not realize the full impact of smart technology.” Indeed, the technology could end up doing more harm than good if the proper training tools are not put in place.

To read more from Cantor and the CCW team, check out our September Market Study, “Smart Contact Centers.”

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