I often think that managing your contact centre performance on a day-to-day basis is like standing on a sandy beach watching the waves come in. Without fail going in, out and always, always, dependent on the weather. Sometimes it’s so monotonous you can drift off in the sun, waves lapping at your feet, then suddenly find you’re floating. Then there are those grey stormy days when it feels like we are going to drown, freezing from head to toe, no wetsuit, now fleecy towel.
So, what should be the first thing in the ‘beach bag’ to make sure we don’t drift off in the sun and don’t freeze our bits off when it gets stormy? The answer – Something that shows us our quality of performance, whatever the weather. Quality is the one baseline that we can use, whatever the weather. Properly defined, it can be our deckchair, sunshade as well as our wetsuit and fleecy towel. Get ‘quality’ right and there is no sunburn, no more shivering, chilled to the bone.
Technology should be looking at everything we do
In a contact centre technology world now dominated by AI and multiple customer engagement channels, it’s essential that whatever we use to measure quality is looking at everything we do, all of the time. It’s also desirable that whatever we deploy to help us understand and manage quality can help us perform to the best of our potential and make the very most of the people we have at our disposal.
Whether those people are internal or outsourced, it’s our day to day / hour to hour performance that drives us, whatever our resourcing model, however performance is defined. In simple terms, performance is always a multifaceted measure, made up of different time and process-based outcomes delivered to our desktop by the tech’ that enables our everyday customer engagement. Think of those performance outcomes as the ‘what’, then quality is all about the ‘how’. Keeping track of ‘how’ effectively provides us with the tram lines of what is acceptable / not acceptable to the customer and defines the boundaries of what is ‘on brand’ and what is not.
Look at easy-to-deploy applications
Keeping performance ‘on brand’ is something that contact centre managers (inhouse or out of house) have high on their ‘to do’ lists, whatever the beach, whatever the weather. And in our experience, quality is the one area where we see AI driven applications having an immediate benefit. Easy to deploy on a SAS model with usage-based costing models available, these applications can watch every wave, every temperature and air pressure change. Providing you with an early heads up to get off the deck chair and start putting on your wet suite.
Certainly, nailing quality monitoring is the smartest way I can think of as an entry point to deploying an AI strategy. Whilst the landscape may look confused, given that all vendors say the same thing, what we know is that the ‘best in class’ applications are easy to deploy (with ‘out of the box’ CRM / CCaaS integrations) giving you immediate insight and potentially freeing up valuable resources. We have even seen applications providing individual coaching programmes to save additional time and effort for your managers and training teams.
It worked in the 80’s
All of this somehow reminds me of that Bananarama song…. “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”. For those of you who are much too young to remember, Bananarama are an English female pop band who have had success on the pop and dance charts since 1982. Rather than relying on harmony, the band generally sings in unison, as do their background vocalists. Although there have been line-up changes, the group enjoyed most success as a trio made up of lifelong friends. In the 1980s, Bananarama were listed in the Guinness World Records as the all female group with the most chart entries in the world, a record which they still hold.
If quality is a record that your organisation wants to hold, then get in touch. Let us help you with your AI conversation and provide some additional insight on what’s out there in the world of tech’ so you can have a relaxing time on the beach!!!