Blog

Consumers are more informed than ever before, and their preferences and behaviors are constantly changing. They have dramatically higher expectations, demanding personalized service, more options, faster resolution, and a consistent experience across all channels of communication with a company. Customer loyalty is largely a prehistoric notion, given the ability for consumers to leverage and provide information and reviews online. In fact, according to LeadGenius, a customer’s first contact with a company is roughly 60% of the way through his decision timeline. As a result, companies are increasingly focused on syncing their brand pledge with the experience they deliver.

This blog was co-authored by Windsor Tanner, Vice President Solution Sales, Americas, NICE.

In the first part of this blog series, we explored the reasons why many companies are slow to adopt artificial intelligence. We also discussed how the contact center can be a natural place to consider an augmented intelligence/augmented experience deployment, which can serve as a precursor to artificial intelligence or stand on its own. In this post, we will look at AI in action to discover how it can help transform enterprises.

If you use Siri on your mobile device or Alexa or Google at home, you know that artificial intelligence (AI) is a fast-growing component of the consumer world. Six billion devices are going to begin proactively asking for support in the near future, according to Gartner. Voice-enabled AI applications like these and others are making life more convenient for millions of people around the world.

Customer experience is perhaps the greatest source of competitive advantage available to your company. According to Forrester, companies with superior customer experience grow revenue more than three times faster than companies with inferior customer experience. Greater customer loyalty also abounds, as these satisfied customers will stay with you longer, spend more with you, and recommend you to others.

Has your business undergone the transformation it needs to thrive in an increasingly mobile-driven world? Enacting a bring your own device (BYOD) policy and making your employees accessible anywhere, with any device, is a good start. According to a KPMG survey, 74% of executives who work for highly profitable companies say they have a mobile-enabled workforce.

Conversations abound with talk of the BOT (a web robot that automates tasks) takeover in our customer care practices, but how will the human element evolve? If in just a few short years, 85% of interactions will be handled by BOTs, where does that leave the other 15%? In this post, I will focus on the 15%, its importance within our customer care ecosystem, and how you can ready yourself for the impact this will have on your organization.

Scheduling can be a complicated and daunting task, especially for companies that manage many employees. Between family, illness, and absenteeism, employees may choose to take time off work, leaving Contact Center managers scrambling to find coverage.

Has this ever happened to you?  How often?  

In all these cases, employees not only want to work and get paid, but they also want flexibility in their jobs. In contact centers specifically, staffing needs are consistently inconsistent, making it hard to plan for these situations.

This is where shift bidding comes in. Shift bidding allows agents to self-select when they would like to work by going online or by using an app on their mobile devices. These applications then use algorithms to determine the type of work or skills that are required for coverage and identify the most qualified bidders to cover each shift.

Read on to learn how shift bidding has evolved to help companies better schedule employees, boost engagement, and improve the customer experience.

When assessing an organization’s workforce management (WFM) program, there is one area where the benefits and ease of use seem to far outweigh current practice. That area is employee scheduling.

By 2020, customer experience (CX) is expected to surpass price and product as a key brand differentiator. With an increased focus on CX, companies must now work to optimize their workforce to provide the best service. While many enterprises still manually schedule their employees, automated processes and better WFM help to ensure that scheduling is fair and accommodating, which can ultimately boost employee satisfaction and customer service.

Read on to learn more about the current scheduling landscape and how you can streamline operations to deliver better customer experiences.

Traditional workforce management (WFM) involves spreadsheets and manual time recording, which are onerous processes that decrease customer satisfaction. Contact Center Managers need a way to schedule people optimally, when the work is available for them to complete. This complexity of the randomness of work coming in, combined with the needs of the individuals completing the work, leads us to the need for more advanced solutions for scheduling.  

Today, forward-thinking managers are adopting a smarter, more streamlined approach to satisfy employees, which helps provide a better customer experience (CX). By better scheduling employees with WFM solutions, the center will be optimized as the work will be handled with the right amount of employees at that time. Many times, we see the exception to this on both sides…agents sitting around waiting for work, or so overworked that they quit.