We’ve just concluded 2020 Planning for Uncertain Times – Practical Tips for Contact Center Leaders, a great webinar series where our speakers discussed the can’t miss investments that you should be making. What I truly enjoyed was the engagement of our audience. Their participation in the Q&A gave speakers the opportunity to address a great deal of questions. There were so many questions that we ran out of time to address them. So without further ado, here are the responses to the 3 questions we did not get to:

There is a lot of information out there about speech analytics and how it can benefit contact centers, but what is it exactly and what value does it bring to the customer experience? In simple terms, speech analytics provides one view into the voice of the customer. It lets you “listen” to EVERY call – and analyze EVERY call. Sounds better than having to take a sampling and hoping you get the right ones to give you a full perspective, right? Now you no longer need to rely on managers to manually evaluate calls to identify performance improvement opportunities. And you get near real time insights from customers that gives you an understanding of how you can improve specific interactions.

Agents are the most critical resource in a contact center and yet the hardest to retain as evident with high attrition rates. As per the NICE inContact ICMI survey 25% of agents left the company in the past 12 months; 20% of agents left the contact center but stayed within the company; and 18% of agents changed positions in the contact center. Investing in AX has risen as one of the top priorities contact center leaders are undertaking to engage, motivate and most importantly retain agents.

Optimization is one of those buzzy words that gets thrown around a lot in the contact center industry. According to the all-knowing Merriam-Webster, optimization is the “act, process, or methodology of making something as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.” So to state the obvious – workforce optimization from a software perspective are those solutions that directly improve and upscale the productivity, efficiency and quality output of your agents.

It’s a foundational concept that all effective contact center leaders know to be true—when you take care of your agents, they take care of your business. Cultivating a culture of appreciation will keep agents inspired to perform in their job roles all year long. So, just before what is likely the busiest season of the year for your contact center, it’s important to look back on 2019 and reflect on the hard work your agents have put in.

There is extensive research that shows moving your contact center to the cloud is an inevitable requirement to staying competitive and relevant. In a recent market report, a key finding states “Cloud contact centers have become a necessary step for companies to adopt a systematic approach that enhances performance, channels support and engagement, reporting and analytics to...

For contact center agents, it sometimes feels like either the workday drags on or it flies by with a flash. But maybe there is a happy medium for your agents - like when you are playing your favorite game or sport and completely lose track of time. Some people refer to that phenomenon as “being in the...