Modernizing your contact center

If you manage a contact center, you’ve probably asked yourself: “How can my brand be where my customers are without breaking my business or my budget?” You are not alone. In fact, most of today’s enterprise brands face this challenge. In our ebook, Modernizing Your Contact Center, we’ll show you how to embrace the challenge and meet more customers in their channel of choice, along with how to plan, staff, measure, and improve in a constantly changing market.

Enterprise customer care has shifted more in recent years than in 20 years prior. The revolution brands experience today is due to three main factors:

Digital is taking over contact centers and channels are increasing

Digital channels are quickly closing the gap on traditional enterprise customer care. The tectonic plates of care have shifted more in recent years than in 20 years prior: digital messaging has surpassed the use of voice, as over 68% of consumers said they text more than they talk on their smartphones. They previously used a single channel to call you (your “800 number”), but now consumers are using a variety of digital channels depending on region, age, or other preferences. Your contact center must adapt, or be left behind.

AI can help, but also complicate contact centers

Not only do contact center managers struggle with how to staff and plan for channel proliferation, they are also faced with overwhelming volumes of data as a result. Consumers are writing more messages to brands to request help, a trend driven in part by the ease of asynchronous messaging and the proliferation of channels. It’s as easy to send a message to a brand as it is to friends and family. Faced with surging volumes of structured and unstructured data, there is a lot of opportunity for AI to help customer service leaders. The challenge begins with finding the right use cases to apply AI so it’s useful and not harmful to your business. And then, how do you plan and staff your human agents vs your bots?

Traditional workforce planning was not built for an asynchronous world

Email aside, most contact centers operate and manage resources with models built for a single channel — phone — and a single communication style — synchronous (a live conversation, that closes at the end of the session). Agent performance is easier to track in traditional synchronous environments with a defined start and end time, like a phone call or a chat session.

Download the ebook now to learn actionable strategies to improve your enterprise customer care.