Contact centres are responsible for delivering best-in-class brand experiences in every interaction. Operating in a dynamic “live” mode, they handle a continuous stream of digital and voice interactions. Whether a customer initiates contact through a call, requests a callback, or seeks better engagement through contact centre channels, it is important to ensure minimal or no disruption to the experience. Poor interaction experiences, compliance lapses, or outages can have immense negative impact on brands.
It is crucial for contact centres to maintain a “watertight” operation, addressing and mitigating challenges proactively. Constant monitoring of contact centre activities helps build resilience. Insights into metrics like call volumes, call quality, abandoned calls, average wait times, and agent performance, can help them identify process inefficiencies and streamline operations. This in turn results in improved efficiency, cost reduction, and an enhanced overall customer experience.
Operational Efficiency is a Key CX Imperative
- 56% Setting CX related KPIs for entire business
- 52% Improving customer self-service
- 50% Mapping customer journey to identify pain points
- 48% Focusing on employee training and upskilling
- 40% Automated monitoring for operational efficiency
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Table of Contents
Challenges Facing Contact Centre Operations
#1 Maintaining a Seamless Omnichannel Experience
Customers today move from one channel to another in a fluid, non-linear manner – which is why it is more important than ever to provide a seamless omnichannel experience.
They might want to speak to an agent, move on to digital channels, go back to a voice call, and go through an interactive voice response (IVR) menu and get routed to an agent again. Organisations need to ensure that they can deliver the same experience across all channels; all interactions flowing seamlessly from one channel to another.
Ensuring seamless experiences across all channels requires careful coordination and the implementation of robust load testing and stress testing measures. Rigorous testing protocols are essential to maintaining resilience in each channel throughout the planning and implementation process, preventing disruptions. This proactive approach allows potential anomalies to be identified ahead of time and addressed before they impact customers.
#2 Avoiding Failure in Voice Conversations
Ecosystm research finds that voice calls constitute 30% of interactions in today’s contact centres; they are vital for providing direct and immediate communication, enabling nuanced interactions and issue resolution.
This highlights the importance of always ensuring voice quality. Voice quality monitoring is also a critical component of effective risk management and compliance in regulated industries, such as Financial Services, Healthcare, and Public Sector. It helps to ensure business operations are aligned with established standards, policies, and legal requirements.
Modern voice architecture and connectivity enable 100% uptime, crystal clear audio quality, agent-to-consumer voice monitoring, call recording, speech analytics, and more. While this may sound easy to achieve, ensuring high standards of audio quality requires constant quality monitoring to reveal any dark spots, ensuring proactive measures are taken to address network and other issues in advance. Assessing voice quality involves monitoring for poor network conditions in specific locations, verifying agent equipment, managing bandwidth in cloud contact centres, and optimising the performance of the IVR system under load.
"98% of contact centres measure the first call resolution (FCR) for voice calls, as a tangible metric to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the customer experience."
#3 Managing a Hybrid Contact Centre Workforce
The Work from Anywhere model is relatively new and has put enormous pressure on contact centres over the last few years.
Contact centres can employ agents who are situated in physical offices, located in offshore locations through a business process outsourcing (BPO) model, or working remotely from home.
A dispersed, remote workforce adds to the complexity of an organisation’s business continuity plan (BCP). Agents working from home must deliver the same level of CX as those based in office setups. Different strategies are required for BCP in the Work from Anywhere model to address specific issues. For remote agents, additional complexities include:
- Lack of a proper work setup including low-quality headsets and excessive background noise
- Poor and intermittent connectivity and bandwidth
- Sudden power outages, voice signals, and other issues that are beyond the control of the agent
"Ecosystm research shows that only 16% of contact centre employees want to work from an office all the time."
#4 Ensuring Zero Disruption in Conversational AI
AI-driven self-service lets customers engage on their terms – accessing account details, asking about orders, and confirming purchases conveniently.
However, conversations can sometimes become complicated within self-service platforms and go beyond the scope of the Conversational AI solution. Immediate human intervention is needed to ensure customer satisfaction. An immediate, seamless, handoff to an agent is a must to avoid call backs that could lead to frustrated customers and consequently, a failed Conversational AI implementation.
The transition from AI to a human should be continually tested to ensure that the call goes through easily when the customer chooses to talk to an agent and the agent is able to receive the call instantaneously. Testing and proactively monitoring these scenarios is important to avoid unanswered calls and poor-quality audio that disrupts the entire experience.
Building a Plan for Minimal Disruption to Day-to-Day Operations
Build a path for end-to-end monitoring in the contact centre to ensure 100% operational resiliency. These are some of the key areas to think about:
Voice Monitoring
Monitoring voice calls prevents disruptions, ensuring incoming calls proceed smoothly. Maintaining high quality voice service is essential to prevent degradation in call quality.
Stress and Load Testing
Testing helps contact centres in capacity planning and handling challenges during seasonal peaks. Regular testing for peaks throughout the day or week is crucial to prevent disruptions.
Proactive Troubleshooting
Real-time data enables contact centre managers to proactively troubleshoot issues. It helps identify anomalies during peak periods or outages, allowing teams to maintain uninterrupted customer service.
Analytics to Monitor Agent Experience
Analytics identifies high and low performing agents, especially important with a remote workforce. This includes identifying Internet issues affecting voice quality.
100% Uptime in Any Environment
Contact centres, whether on-premises or cloud- based, need to ensure 100% uptime for uninterrupted service. Monitoring network and Internet quality is crucial to prevent disruptions, as downtime can result in communication loss and financial costs.
Ecosystm Opinion
CX leaders are under pressure to ensure that their contact centres run well all the time.
There are many factors that can impact contact centre availability and end user experience, and even a small interruption to these critical customer-facing services can have a significant impact with expensive repercussions on the business.
Cloud contact centre migration, delivery of an omnichannel experience, rise in self-service, and increased adoption of AI are just some of the areas impacting the customer experience landscape. Despite these advancements, the bottom line remains: in any situation, customers only care about the quality of interaction and the level of service they receive. To meet customers’ core expectation of high-quality service, contact centres must shift from a reactive to a proactive approach in customer experience. It is essential to anticipate future challenges and implement proactive strategies to address them.
