Workforce Management Featured Article
Contact Centers Should Aim to Become Experience Centers
Contact centers learned a lot of lessons during the pandemic. For starters, they learned that business can shift in an instant. During quarantine, many consumers began relying heavily on online ordering, which put increased pressure on contact centers. Many companies didn’t live up to the moment, presenting callers with long wait times, abandoned calls and harried agents.
Deloitte Digital’s 2021 Global Contact Center Survey has identified five trends that contact center leaders are adopting to spark better operations, provide better customer experiences, and help drive growth. These include agile service, artificial intelligence, distributed workplaces, putting the right resources in the right channels, and focusing on value. The goal of all these actions, according to the survey, is for call centers to become revenue generators and experience hubs.
One of the most critical steps to achieving these goals, according to Deloitte (News - Alert) Digital, is the migration to full cloud capabilities to take advantage of advanced cloud contact center technologies. The survey found that at the end of 2020, only 32 percent of surveyed organizations were running contact center technologies in the cloud; now, 75 percent expect to make the move within the next two years.
“More leaders now recognize that cloud is not simply a ‘nice to have,’ it is an imperative for doing business in a time when customers, competitors, markets and technologies can change in the blink of an eye,” according to the report’s authors.
Contact centers, the report concludes, need to become customer experience hubs, and not simply reactionary entities solving customer problems.
"Businesses understand the importance of customer experience to build trust and loyalty, but those that want to be leaders need to take the lessons learned during 2020 and invest in solutions for changing consumer needs. This starts with looking at your customer service capabilities and doubling down on digital transformation, new technologies and reimagined workplaces," said Andy Haas, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Service Transformation leader at Deloitte Digital, in a statement. "Importantly, we've learned that contact centers have become vital to customer experience in ways that we hadn't seen before and will play a critical role in a strong service strategy."
Edited by Luke Bellos
