Contact center managers can struggle under the weight of delivering great service, while also being expected to provide valuable customer insights to the wider business. It’s a tough gig.
Based on Harvard Business Review research, during the 2020 and 2021 Covid crisis, companies saw hold times increase by 34% and escalations go up by 68%. Expected or unexpected, companies need to improve how their contact centres are set up and provide higher levels of customer experience.
At EdgeTier, we have spoken to over 50 contact centres to understand their issues. Our research highlighted five key challenges that managers experience regularly. Here they are:
1. Managers can’t understand customers' conversations in real-time.
Hidden issues often go undetected meaning that customer experience is below standard. In order to find the root of the issue, often managers will revert back to asking agents what is going wrong. Resorting to polling agents is typically very inaccurate and it generally makes real-time customer understanding extremely difficult.
2. Managers need a better process to understand customer insights.
Contact centre managers have difficulty with direct visibility into data and trends. Our interviews highlighted that the current customer monitoring processes involve fixed dashboards, inaccurate contact tagging by agents, and manual reviews by contact centre management. These processes mean customer service managers are struggling to understand their customers and therefore cannot communicate meaningful customer insights to the wider business.
3. A need to quickly quantify an issue's impact to the company.
When customer issues are highlighted by agents, contact centre managers are struggling to quantify the impact of the customer issue. When basing insights on agent feedback, it is difficult to know if an issue is only impacting a handful of customers, or if it is impacting a large portion of the customer base. What’s worse, when customer service teams try to highlight issues to other departments, they are not taken seriously as it is difficult for them to prove the size of the issue.
4. Managers struggle to understand how customers are really feeling.
Once a chat is resolved the customer feedback questions are quite general which means that the true customer sentiment is unclear. Managers struggle to accurately understand how the customer found the experience and therefore, insights are limited.
5. Managers spend too long understanding team performance
According to a study conducted by Cornell University and published in its global call center report, the average turnover rate in North American contact centers is 25% to 33%. A large percentage of leavers cite lack of training and poor experience with a customer as exit triggers. Managers are constantly under pressure to ensure teams are appropriately trained and performing to contact centre standards.
Forbes has found that managers are struggling to measure agent performance. Managers are in the dark about which agent needs personalised coaching and support to improve agent productivity and time management. This lack of visibility can negatively affect customer experience as it can lead to poor quality responses.
5 Ways ai is helping contact centres
Delivering an exceptional customer experience has never been harder for contact centre managers — yet at the same time, there is opportunity to address the above challenges with artificial intelligence. Here are five ways EdgeTier is helping to improve the life of contact centre managers with AI:
1. Real-time conversation monitoring
EdgeTier AI unearths hidden issues and spikes in contacts with 24/7, real-time, monitoring of all contact centre activity. The AI constantly scans all contact centre activity and proactively notify managers about anomalies and events affecting customer experience as soon as they start. Real time monitoring and alerting keeps managers ahead of customer issues as opposed to playing catch up and guessing games.
2. AI brings insights to managers
AI gives contact centre managers a better understanding of their customer data by bringing insights to them. Quick access to data ensures issues and key customer trends can be acted and learned from immediately. Contact centre managers will spend less time watching dashboards and focus on learning from customer insights for the improvement of customer experience.
3. Impact quantification
EdgeTier AI will quickly quantify an issue's impact to the company by detecting all queries related to an issue. Once an issue is detected, managers can quickly quantify the scale of an issue and provide other departments with clear, unambiguous evidence.
"EdgeTier’s technology allows us to deliver a highly efficient customer service, while providing a detailed understanding of our performance and the needs of our customers"
4. Customer emotion detection
AI can detect emotions of customers based on their conversations with agents, for example detecting frustration or delight. By understanding how customers feel about a company, managers can determine where conversations are going wrong and where customer experience is below standard.
5. Real-time metric monitoring
EdgeTier AI can analyse real-time metrics to understand the performance of your team and let managers know what areas need improving. AI can detect spikes in contact, detect scheduling errors, as well as report on changes in key performance metrics like handling times, customer satisfaction and response times. Once a change is identified, EdgeTier can identify the root cause of the issue so that it can be quickly resolved.
Conclusion
Contact managers are under pressure to ensure their contact centres are the beating heart of customer insights for their companies. AI offers a cutting-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates the need to rely on busy agents for customer insight or perform time-consuming manual reviews. Adopting AI results in leaps in customer insights and experience.
If you would like to find out more about how EdgeTier AI can make your life easier click the button below.
