Work-anywhere functionality.
Cloud platforms have all but spelled the end of phone banks. The trend has accelerated during COVID-19. A survey of 500 call centers by SQM Group found that 87% of agents were working from home at the end of 2021, up from 19% just two years earlier. It is unlikely that many of those people will want to give up the convenience they’ve discovered during the pandemic, and neither will their employers. “Due to higher employee and customer satisfaction with reduced operating costs, most call center leaders will continue with a work-from-home model,” SQM wrote.
Automated agent scheduling.
This function has been the target of enormous innovation and investment recently. The technology balances employee preferences with management needs, enabling workers to post their preferred hours and match their requests with available work times. The result is less complexity, lower cost, and improved employee morale.
Session replay.
Calls, chats, and other digital interactions can now be captured in their entirety and replayed by agents and supervisors for training and feedback purposes.
Supervisor monitoring.
Call center managers can now get a unified view of all agent performance against critical metrics such as call waiting and resolution times. This permits them to instantly spot irregularities and even use competitive gamification tactics to improve performance.
Interactive and self-study agent training.
Agents and their supervisors can choose from large libraries of cloud-based training resources to further their skills. Materials can be customized to the specific needs of the organization and even include recorded conversations from within a specific call center.
Customer satisfaction metrics.
Customers can provide instant feedback on their experiences through online surveys, with the results shared with agents and call center managers.
Integrated AI-enabled chat.
The capabilities of cloud-hosted chatbots are growing by leaps and bounds. It’s estimated that they will soon be able to answer between 75% and 90% of customer inquiries. These capabilities can be added to a website or a mobile app through a simple application programming interface (API).
Intelligent interactive voice recognition.
Accuracy rates for natural-language processing systems exceed 98% in some cases — and large language models such as GPT-3 support conversational interactions of astonishing quality. Deployed via a simple API, these systems can all but eliminate the need for users to navigate decision trees and can deliver rich information to call center agents before they even pick up the phone.