Trends And Challenges For Call Centers In 2015

Written by KOVA Corp

Every contact center manager worth his salt knows that you’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head. Marching hand-in-hand with supervising daily operations is the need to see where change is taking place. By keeping an eye peeled for the next wave in customer satisfaction you can meet events strategically.

More Mobile

As the number of customers using mobile devices to interact with companies grows, keeping ahead in customer service can be difficult. The current state of the industry still shows a sluggish move to integrated multichannel operations. The sheer inertia of the current infrastructure means that the adoption of customer service applications that are mobile based is unlikely in the near future.

It is worth watching closely, however. Smartphones offer customers a variety of ways to communicate with business. Those segments of the call center industry that remain tied to traditional desktop telephony risk frustrating customers. In the interest of maximizing customer satisfaction, the move to integrated mobile applications and a quality mobile customer support experience is inevitable.

Distributed Teams

The rise of advanced mobile devices has an impact on more than just customer service. The workforce itself is responding to the flexibility digital communication has brought about. Companies of all sizes are allowing employees to work part- or fulltime from home. The advantages offered include not only improved morale among agents and a concomitant increase in customer satisfaction – companies can experience savings by reducing their real estate footprint.

A study carried out by the National Association of Call Centers revealed that more than 70% of companies presently providing work-from-home opportunities plan on expanding them. Another study by Customer Contact Strategies reported that over 80% of contact centers have some form of telecommuting workforce.

The logistics of managing distributed work teams will make workforce management more important than ever before. Key will be the heightened emphasis on ‘first contact resolution’ – making sure a customer’s problem is resolved in the initial communication.

Collaboration across distributed teams will become more important than ever before. Agent will need more training to allow them to work across channels, and managers will need to provide adaptive oversight to ensure agents are in those channels when they are needed.

Looking Ahead

John Cray in Business2Community, notes “Historically, in a traditional contact center, agents and managers could “walk across the aisle” to determine who to escalate an unresolved call to. In today’s “hybrid contact center environment,” the best person to leverage may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. This means that contact centers will become more heavily reliant upon best skills routing, combined with collaboration tools that join agents with experts in real-time. Breaking down traditional contact center boundaries enables better customer service and a better customer experience, a primary goal through 2015 and beyond.”

KOVA’s Impact360 WorkForce Optimization solutions can help your contact center address these challenges. They provide the needed information in an easy to view and actionable format, and make improving customer service easy. Contact KOVA today to find out more!

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