Your agents have replaced the brick, and mortar front desk reception
We have all known for some time that contact center agents represent the “face” of the company for many customers. This fact has proliferated as online interactions with companies has grown, removing the brick and mortar in-person contacts we all used to have during the buying process.
The way we interact has changed, dramatically. Brick and mortar has been in a steep decline for the past decade. We shop online. We use apps to summon car rides and order billions of dollars in products from Amazon.
The one constant we can count on is that things change.
In the past, we trained agents with scripts, listened to a few live or recorded calls per week, and coached agents based on that sliver of interactions. Quality Management technology simply could not automate or handle anything more than that, but like our new landscape, technology has radically changed.
Today's workforce optimization technologies can increase coverage for script adherence, proactively highlight calls where customers or agents exhibited emotion, abruptly hung up, or said phrases like: “this is the third time I’ve called” to point out coaching, IVR, or other areas for improvement.
If nothing else, going from random sampling to 100% script adherence for compliance phrases to protect revenue is worth the investment for contact centers, but the value of elevated customer experience is really where a return on investment is found with speech analytics and voice of the customer.
If you haven't looked at the new technologies, even with less than 100 agents, you could be leaving value on the table, taking compliance risks, and alienating some customers.
Agents are likely the first person a customer will talk to at your company. We need to be sure they are not the last.
