In With The Old and Out With The New Contact Center

As the year comes to a close, there can be a tendency to mistake being grateful for all you have with romanticizing the many struggles endured throughout the year.

Take the contact center, for example. While we should be thankful for our call center agents: proud that, in an ever-changing world, they still prevail as the number one preferred point of contact for customer service interactions—we must address the reasons behind why. Why is self-service technology not up to par? Why are customers still typing in “Agent” the moment an automated bot pops up on the screen? And why do customers have to wait so long to get the right agent on the phone?

Call centers have a mixed reaction to these pain points. Some have decided to take action once January rolls around. Sixty-three (63%) of brands plan to reduce wait times in 2023, 22% are looking to address the limited support hours, and 15% will increase the availability of live agents.

These percentages are good, but also indicate that nearly half of the brands surveyed are committing to inaction. In other words, they are comfortable with the contact center operations they currently have even though customers feel adversely. Brian Cantor, the principal analyst and director for CCW Digital, comments that percentages like these raise “potential concern about how brands are approaching the customer experience.”

Indeed, if customers are reporting that repetitive questions and frequent transfers are one of their biggest issues with the contact center and only 48% of brands are committed to focusing on that in the next year, what message is being sent to the end user?

It is likely that at least some of the 52% of brands who claim to not be worrying about wait times and transfers are directing their resources toward automated, self-service options. Still, is that authentically responding to customer complaints, or simply avoiding the issue at hand? Cantor goes on to say, “If the customers who rely on agents are presently upset about not being able to reach them for certain issues—or at certain hours—simply adding more bots is not going to solve the problem. Brands that claim to be customer-centric have no choice but to make agents increasingly available in a broader set of channels, during a bigger window of operating hours.”

Customers cannot and will not be forced to use the automated options just because the live agent option is inconvenient. In fact, by neglecting to improve the contact center live-agent pain points, brands aren’t encouraging customers to try self-service options but pushing them to try a different brand.

Consider empowering customers to solve issues on their own, instead. Make the tools accessible to them, easy to use, and abundantly clear. This not only solves problems faster, but leaves room for those who need live agents to access them quickly.

For more information on the Future of the Contact Center, check out our last Market Study of the year here. To hear commentary from the most respected leaders in the Contact Center space on this topic, be sure to view our on-demand December online event: Future of the Contact Center.