What will you remember about July 2019? Fireworks? Record-breaking heat? Amazon Prime Day? If you found yourself otherwise occupied this month and missed some of the insightful content published on the Pipeline blog, the following is a list of the five most popular posts in July. Topics include: How to develop a customized approach schedule adherence for the modern work environment; a look at the disruptive impact that the Generational Expectations (GX) of millennials and Gen Z’ers will have on Customer Experience (CX); advice for vendors on how to improve the value of product demos for your contact center audience; top ways that AI can impact and improve the contact center; and steps for getting frontline agents involved and engaged with performance improvement.
Revisiting Contact Center Schedule Adherence
When you find someone in a contact center who is passionate about schedule adherence, it’s a good bet he/she is (or once was) a member of a workforce management team (WMT). That’s because all of the forecasting and scheduling and planning done by anyone in a WMT is useless if no one actually follows the plan. Yes, agents and supervisors on the floor also care about adherence and want to meet the objective. But in the WMT, it goes beyond just wanting it. Good adherence is vital to the WMT’s survival.
CX Versus GX: When Worlds Collide
Let me start by once again offering a real-world experience, such as the one I described in my April 2019 column, CX Pundits vs. CX Practitioners: Real Life or Fantasy? In it, I described the wonderful world of the customer experience as described, written about, and generally fawned over by contact center industry pundits, and how that wonderful world compares to the real-world that I often experience when it comes to customer service. In the end, the problem I described in that column was solved and I’m still a customer of that company.
Contact Center Vendors: A Memo About Your Demo
Memo to the Vendor Community:
We work with many clients that are interested in acquiring new technology. It is always a good sign when investments in technology are being made. As we work through the acquisition process with clients, technology providers are asked to deliver a system “demo.” For some, this becomes more of a demolition than a demonstration… and the focus of this month’s discussion.
Making AI Work in the Contact Center
In the late 2000s, right around when videosharing platforms were really coming into their own, there was a curious trend among marketing executives. “Viral videos” captured the zeitgeist, and every brand decided they needed to have one—even if they didn’t fully understand what made a clip “go viral” or how to be strategic with its use. They simply needed to have one and the rest would figure itself out. The same trend is often true for innovative and game-changing technology solutions. Take artificial intelligence (AI), for example. PwC estimates that AI will contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and every industry—including contact centers—is rushing to adopt their own AI strategy.
Engage Your Agents to Turn Around an Underperforming Contact Center
When the team is not performing at expected levels, the troops are gathered together, a rallying speech is given by the supervisor, and after cheerful, optimistic group chatter, everyone breaks and heads back to their assignments. Do those types of actions get enough traction to change the direction of your center’s performance? For some reason, there is a fallacy that leadership can “coach its way out” of poor performance. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t work long-term.
