Workforce Management Featured Article
Call Centers Can Reduce Holiday Retail Stress with Automation
While the holidays may be “the most wonderful time of the year” for most of us, there is often a different attitude in retail companies looking to staff holiday call centers. In ordinary years, staffing is a challenge at the holidays: temporary workers are often brought on board to keep call queues from getting too long, and these people need to be trained rapidly, which can often lead to quality of service issues.
This has not been an ordinary year. Labor shortages persist, and many call centers are operating on remote or hybrid models and still figuring out how to make it work. Customers are doing more online shopping than ever before, and they expect omnichannel support when they do so. According to new research from Verint, more than 60 percent of retailers are challenged to find qualified candidates to staff their stores, while 45 percent are struggling to fill contact center and back-office positions.
To try and fill the gaps, more call centers are bringing intelligent automation online to help reduce the pressure on live agents.
“Staffing shortages in stores, in the back-office, and contact center roles will challenge retailers in their efforts to provide exceptional customer experiences to satisfy shoppers during the busy holiday shopping season this year,” says Verint’s (News - Alert) Jenni Palocsik, vice president of marketing insights, experience and enablement. “Leveraging automation is absolutely critical to fill workforce gaps and create a connected customer engagement strategy of humans and bots.”
While 94 percent of retailers surveyed plan to hire new workers for the holiday season, nearly 30 percent report not having enough HR staff to handle the number of vacancies that need to be filled. Automation that helps retailers expand their organizational capacity to interview and qualify candidates can provide relief in this area.
Many retailers are already leveraging automation to some degree. Automation is either in place or planned for retail activities such as tracking orders (81 percent), inventory management (81 percent), sending customized offers or recommendations (79 percent), and processing returns (69 percent). Just 56 percent of respondents currently have automation in place for customer support, and 21 percent plan to implement it while 23 percent don't use or plan to use that type of automation.
Retailers have an opportunity to leverage powerful private messaging channels as a means to ubiquitously connect with shoppers at any place and any time, yet 61 percent of retailers are missing out. Of the 39 percent of retailers engaging with customers via private messaging, 81 percent have automation on that channel, which can automate customer engagement at scale via bots.
Ultimately, the more automation brands build into their operations, the more they will be able to withstand any trends – seasonal or other – without a significant impact on CX.
Edited by Erik Linask
