The Smart Way to Handle Your Agent Shortage Problem this Holiday Season
Just hear those phone lines jingling, ring ting tingle-ing too.
After the last slice of Thanksgiving pie has been served, millions of people will rush out the door to score the best deals of the year. Then they’ll call: about shipping delays, return policies, order details, discount codes, you name it – on top of all the other inquiries your contact center normally handles.
Unless you put more tushes in cushions, you’ll only have so many people manning your phones. Here’s how to best manage the call spikes coming your way.
AI and automation for the win, right? Yes and no. Here’s my two cents…
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
People tell me that when they call a customer service number and hear an automated assistant, they go on the defense. I can relate. Am I going to have to fight this thing to get the outcome I want, and how long will it take? If you’re not confident enough that your customers would choose your automated assistant without being forced to use it, don’t invest in it.
There are plenty other ways you can use AI and automation to manage demand (see below). If you’re set on an automated assistant, just know you can’t force customers to do things your way. Let them try your assistant if they choose, make sure it’s truly intelligent and intuitive to their needs, and always provide an out.
Use AI to optimize the performance of the staff you have.
You’ll be like a kid on Christmas morning when you see the magic of AI for task automation. Your agents will be freed from time-consuming, queue-clogging tasks nearly overnight. Consider customer authentication: you must verify the identity of each person who contacts your organization, right? This could be through knowledge-based authentication (ex: “What’s the city you were born in?”) or by verifying personally identifiable information like a customer’s address or SSN. Sometimes it’s all the above.
What if you could use a customer’s hold time to handle this via an automated assistant so they can get right down to business when they’re connected to an agent? What if you used AI and automation to offer an even more effective form of customer authentication like a 3D photo scan? Calls would be processed faster and the agents you do have would work more efficiently. This is completely possible and not nearly as difficult as it seems. Consider how else you can use AI and automation internally to address the challenge of demand exceeding staff.
There’s no place like (work from) home for the holidays
What’s great about remote work for contact center managers is the ability to source agents from anywhere in a tight labor market. If you must hire to scale for seasonal demand, you can look far and wide based on needs around skills and labor costs. What’s not so great about remote work is the lack of visibility for quality assurance and team monitoring.
My opinion: adopt the remote work strategy of 2020 with technology that meets current Quality Assurance (QA) needs.
It’s 2022: why can’t you remotely monitor calls in real-time as if you were walking the contact center floor? What’s stopping you from ensuring high Quality of Service (QoS) regardless of where your agents work or what their setup looks like?
Again, this is the beauty of AI:
AI-powered noise removal ensures crystal clear audio regardless of what’s happening behind the scenes.Agents can’t predict when their dog will bark or when their neighbor will be doing yard work. This is a game-changing AI feature that filters out distracting background noises – even an agent’s keyboard strokes – to ensure QoS from anywhere.
Closed captioning automatically shows on an agent’s screen what a customer is saying in real-time to keep quality high and call processing fast. Even with background noise removed, you could easily miss a word or a key piece of information that you’d hate to ask the customer to repeat.
Real-time translation is yet another way AI helps manage demand without needing to hire. Imagine all your agents essentially becoming bi-lingual. It’s a huge value-add!
AI speech analytics monitors conversations in real-time and alerts managers when in-the-moment intervention may be necessary. Will this help improve CSAT and keep calls flowing? You bet.
Follow these tips and from now on your troubles will be miles away. If you want to learn more about AI for the contact center, give me a shout or contact an Avaya expert here. Happy managing!
IT Leadership