Technology Helps Solve Call Center Staffing Crises

Call centers are under considerable pressure today. As both the number of contacts and the channels through which customers reach out escalate, there simply aren’t enough human agents to answer every call. While some of it may be cost-cutting on the part of companies, the dearth of labor is about more than just a desire to keep costs low.

“Contact centers are facing a crisis right now,” Benjamin Gleitzman, cofounder and chief technology officer of Replicant, an enterprise conversational artificial intelligence provider, told Destination CRM. “I’ve had the opportunity to talk with dozens, if not hundreds, of contact center leaders over the past several months, and I hear the same challenges over and over: There’s difficulty hiring, there are escalating costs, there are budget cuts, there’s the Great Resignation, call volumes are changing 10 times from one week to the next.”

Call centers always had trouble with high turnover, but in recent years, the labor shortage has reached crisis levels. Customer behaviors are changing, and the days of the 9:00 to 5:00 call center are a quaint relic of the past. So without the ability to recruit more agents, what’s a company to do if it wants to preserve a good customer experience?

Technology is the answer. Better automation – and more of it – can help relieve the pressure on human agents and solve more basic customer queries. Smart automated solutions driven by artificial intelligence can ascertain the reason for the call, and either handle it automatically or pass it to a human agent.

Another way call centers can reduce the pressure on agents is by making use of the growth in user-generated data that they are collecting. When call centers can capture, archive, and retrieve multichannel interactions with a single tool, they are better placed to allocate human resources to ensure that customer satisfaction remains high. The benefits of a good call center analytics tool aren’t just limited to customers. Speech, text and desktop analytics tools increase employee satisfaction through recognition, flexible scheduling, applicable training and enhanced operations planning.

Edited by Luke Bellos

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