The pandemic laid bare the tenuous relationship between many contact centers and their agents. The abrupt shift to remote work was just one component of the changes still under way. The past four years have also seen enterprises reckoning with questions about how to hire, what to pay their employees, what skills are needed and how an avalanche of new technology will change their operations.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Contact Center,
Knowledge Management,
agent management,
Intelligent Self-Service,
Generative AI,
GenAI
A lot of conversations around contact centers deal with automation, particularly how to balance the way humans and automated systems work together. Self-service, the front end of the customer interaction, is where practitioners get a first taste of the marvels of increasingly advanced automation. As customer expectations ramped up and labor became more costly during the pandemic, deflecting interactions away from agents took on new urgency. We continue to see impressive advances in automated...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Self-service,
automation,
Contact Center,
Knowledge Management,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Intelligent Self-Service,
Conversational AI
Organizations looking to improve the customer experience and contact center operations should closely examine the processes at work in the front-end self-service environment. Technology advancements are converging at this gateway, including artificial intelligence, chatbots and knowledge management. The front end of the customer interaction offers a greater opportunity for customer engagement than most organizations realize.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Self-service,
Contact Center,
Knowledge Management,
Chatbots,
agent management,
Intelligent Self-Service
Organizations universally desire the business outcome of improved organizational agility — in other words, the ability to quickly and effectively identify and respond to business risks and opportunities, typically through workforce-related actions. Being agile requires that an organization be adept at two things: harnessing cognitive assets, the knowledge and ideas that comprise the intellectual capital of a workforce, and deploying and using technologies that channel those assets where they...
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Topics:
Human Capital Management,
Learning Management,
Collaboration,
Workforce Management,
Knowledge Management,
AI & Machine Learning
Customer engagement is nothing new – organizations have been engaging with customers in one way or another ever since business began. Over the years, however, the nature of this engagement has changed dramatically, from largely face-to-face encounters and the written word to telephone, email, fax and text messaging and now to text-based applications, social media, mobile apps and video. These changes prompted organizations to create call centers to centralize the handling of phone calls, then...
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Topics:
Customer Analytics,
Customer Engagement,
Customer Experience,
Customer Service,
Contact Center,
Workforce Optimization,
Knowledge Management