Show Me the Money: Investment Challenges to Address in 2023

In one of the favorite super bowl commercials of this year, Bud Light features Miles Teller and his wife, Keleigh Sperry, cracking open a beer and dancing as they wait on hold with customer service for well over an hour.

This commercial was loved not just because it showed an adorable couple enjoying the little things in life, but because it was so relatable—many of us have waited on hold so long that we began singing or dancing along to the hold music, looking for anything that could cure our boredom. Unfortunately, the commercial likely would have done just as well three years ago.

Despite the investments in technology over the past few years, it seems long call wait times and an unnecessary number of transfers are still a shared experience when it comes to calling customer support.

How is it that, despite thousands (in some cases, millions or even billions) of dollars spent toward eliminating customer stress, contact centers are still struggling with their most basic goal: to reduce wait times?

CCW’s Principal Analyst, Brian Cantor, argues that there is one major contact center pitfall that causes this to happen: how leaders choose the technology to invest in.

How Are Leaders Choosing Technology?

Like any large company, many contact centers have bureaucracies they are forced to compete with to get the necessary funding and approval for new investments. Given the call center agents are not typically the ones in charge of these larger organizational strategies, many times they are not consulted nor asked for insights regarding the impact the technology could have.

This is a huge mistake.

First, no one knows the end-user experience better than the agent. They are speaking to direct consumers constantly, hearing their complaints, addressing their concerns, and doing their best to alleviate customer effort and stress. Though leaders and management may have access to high-quality data about both the employee and customer experience, it hardly scratches the surface of what the agents experience on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately, many contact centers have realized this too late. CCW’s latest Market Study, The State of Contact Center Technology, found that 36% of respondents felt insufficient consideration of the agent and customer experience hurt the success of their technology initiatives. As if not thinking about the customer isn’t bad enough, 19% of companies admitted to not considering agents at all when making technology decisions.

Second, when contact center agents feel they have no authority over the technology used (or, worse, feel that the investment was a bad decision), the company loses buy in that is crucial to the success of the initiative. For the 19% of brands that do not consider the agent experience when making technology decisions, buy-in is going to be an even larger issue. Asking employees to learn new systems and leverage them to perform better at their jobs while simultaneously not listening to their needs is truly setting yourself up for disaster.

Cantor expresses the consequences of not valuing agents’ voices: “At best, these companies are limiting the trust and buy-in they receive for new technology. At worse, they will select the wrong technology—and deal with the consequences of added costs, inefficiencies, and agent attrition.”

The easiest solution? Ask your agents what they think.

Choosing the right technology (and then implementing it without ‘closing for maintenance’) is far from easy. As Cantor points out, in addition to the well-documented cost and resource limitations, contact centers also have to compete with the continuously growing standards customers have for their experience.

Still, by listening to your agents and considering the end-user experience very carefully, you can ensure you are giving your technology the best chance at success. And, hopefully, next year a super bowl commercial about long hold times will be slightly less relatable.

For more on investment challenges and trends for technology in 2023, download CCW’s latest Market Study: The State of Contact Center Technology.