There are more than a few words that could describe 2021 for customer service teams. Challenging? Yes. Eventful? To be sure. Innovative? Of course.
Of all the words to describe contact centers in 2021 though, my personal favorite is “important.” For multiple reasons this word sticks out to me. First, what took place throughout 2021 drove companies to make important decisions about their contact centers. While 2020 saw the rise of remote work, 2021 saw its more permanent adoption into company policy. Similarly, contact center leaders had to make important decisions about staffing and operating their remote or hybrid contact center, and the technical infrastructure that underpinned it all.
The second reason that “important” sticks out is that positive and efficient contact centers and customer service have never been more important. From pandemic challenges and staffing shortages to supply chain issues, contact centers needed to bring their A-game every day and businesses came to realize how important their contact centers were to positive customer sentiment amid crises.
Now as we look ahead to 2022, the importance of the contact center should be fresh in every business leader’s mind. After all, in this new world the contact center is the company’s last defense of its brand in most cases. But what other contact center trends should business leaders be aware of? Here are three that every enterprise should keep an eye on in 2022.
Business Intelligence from the Contact Center
2021 saw an increased use of analytics and artificial intelligence in the contact center. With less face-to-face time between contact center leaders and agents, analytics-based insights became the quality management tools for professional development. However, smart business leaders in 2021 began to see those analytics-based insights as not just an invaluable training or quality assurance tool, but instead a treasure trove of customer information. To be specific, many modern contact centers utilize “voice-of-the-customer” technology to record and parse out key words and phrases. These interactions can even be analyzed with AI-driven sentiment analytics to automatically identify if a customer has a positive or negative sentiment during the interaction.
Yet these insights should not remain sitting as an untapped secret in the contact center. They should be stretched further and used to inform marketing strategy, sales success, HR actions and even finance moves. One example, GreenPath Financial Wellness, used their contact center to analyze customer interactions and reveal a growing trend in questions about rental payments and financial counseling. They used that information to create a marketing campaign promoting financial counseling to target audiences, and even unearthed new language needs for other marketing campaigns and assets. On the HR side, contact center insights can be used to help predict potential turnover based on agent behavior and what this implies about feelings of burnout. And for finance teams, contact centers often receive customer calls with questions about billing, which means that contact center interactions can be used to improve billing processes.
Look for 2022 to be the year that more business leaders take advantage of these contact center insights to inform operations and create efficient, sustainable connections though programmatic, software-supported loops.
Connecting a Happy Frontline to a Happy Enterprise
Employee-centric business practices have always been important, but perhaps never more so than in 2022. Contact centers – along with many industries – are contending with the Great Resignation as employees look for their ideal work situation. Just as the contact center has gained importance in enterprise success, business leaders should be sure to pay close attention to agent morale in the coming year and look for ways to keep agents happy. The risk of not doing so is the potential of high agent turnover. In fact, Gallup’s 2021 poll found that almost half of America’s working population said that they were actively looking for a new job. According to a 2021 study by Calabrio, contact center agent turnover was primarily attributed to frequent occurrences of acute stress and the feeling that businesses weren’t doing enough to help. The study found that one third of agents reported feeling acutely stressed multiple times per week. Two important factors in agent stress are the increasingly complex customer calls and the sheer number of calls – two issues especially prominent in supply chain challenges and workforce shortages.
If businesses leaders want to maintain their contact center workforce, they must be aware of this powder keg of agent stress and take steps to be employee-centric in 2022. Arm employees with technology that can help them succeed, offer employees flexibility when possible and invest in employee development so that employees can see a career path in their role.
The Importance of Simplicity in an Era of Complexity
There is complexity everywhere now, and as we move into the new year that fact certainly isn’t going to change. However, business leaders should focus on the importance of simplicity in 2022, especially within their contact centers. Aiming for simplicity will help keep agents happy and business operations running smoothly and, as previously discussed, keeping agents happy is of the utmost importance in today’s work landscape. One of the best routes to simplification in the era of complexity is to lean into technology. Look for ways that technology can assist or even eliminate manual tasks. Also look for ways that technology can make customer service smarter, because smarter customer service is better customer service. The cloud is particularly relevant here. 2021 saw the many contact centers shift to cloud-based operations – in fact, a Calabrio study found that three quarters of contacts centers have moved to the cloud – and 2022 should see those contact centers use the cloud to its potential.
Cloud-based solutions allow for more flexibility, which can often lead to simplified processes and change management. For example, some cloud-based workforce engagement management solutions allow agents to self-schedule. Organizations also can incorporate agent-facing virtual assistants – giving agents more control and simplifying their lives. As our study found, cloud-based contact centers can also more easily initiate omnichannel expansion and operations than their on-premises counterparts. Offering more options for customer interactions allows agents to meet customers where they want to be met, facilitating a simpler customer experience.
2021 was a complicated year. Strive for simplicity in 2022. And keep an eye out for these three trends in 2022 to help you get the most out of your contact center and the value it holds today for the wider enterprise.
Tom Goodmanson is president and CEO of Calabrio, the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organizations to enrich human interactions
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.