Work-from-Home Contact Center: See the Full Picture with Interaction Analytics

Over the past few weeks, most contact centers have transitioned some or all their agents to a work from-home environment—no easy task. First agents had to be set up with the tools and technology to be productive in their new setting. Once agents were home and safe, priorities shifted to keeping them engaged and productive. This is a lot to handle while also maintaining exceptional customer service outside of the traditional contact center.

In this extraordinary situation, managers and supervisors are facing new challenges to lead their teams effectively while they compete with at home distractions. On top of regular responsibilities, they’re often being stretched thin, sometimes needing to take calls themselves to help with increased interaction traffic (some 2-1-1 centers have reported upwards of 150% increase or more in volume), and needing to find new ways to keep agents engaged and maintain culture and communications. With these additional duties, managers have less time focus on agent performance and customer satisfaction.

Get the complete picture

Managers frequently assess agent performance and CSAT by analyzing interactions - sometimes manually - to uncover issues that need attention. Manually reviewing individual interactions to gauge agent performance and customer satisfaction is challenging and unsustainable in a normal environment, let alone in a work-from-home contact center setting.

Manual listening to individual interactions has major drawbacks: they’re subjective to the opinion of the manager/supervisor performing the task, they’re extremely time consuming, and they only provide a glimpse into an agent’s interactions and true performance. To effectively and efficiently, (and consistently) keep a pulse on customer satisfaction and agent engagement a more complete view is required.  With the power of automation and artificial intelligence, interaction analytics gives you a full view into every conversation and helps you identify work-from-home realities that impact performance or CSAT.

Ensure exceptional service

Interaction analytics allows managers to analyze every interaction to quickly find the root cause of dissatisfaction. You can easily identify your top customer complaints and issues related to products and services, and discover customer sentiment, even frustration, expressed during every contact. Armed with this information, you can promptly address any problems and create just-in-time training opportunities to avoid a repeat situation.

Identify developing patterns and trends and drill down into each interaction so you can take quick action and deliver real-time specific performance feedback to agents.

• Are they demonstrating active listening?
• Are they taking ownership of the issue?
• Are they expressing empathy at the right times?

These insights enable continuous improvement, ensure your agents know you are invested in their success, and promote customer rapport and loyalty.

Keep agents motivated

Keeping agents engaged and motivated goes hand-in-hand with providing outstanding customer service.  Agents perform best when training is tailored to their needs. It is easier to understand performance issues when you can review interactions based on agent-specific categories and sentiment to identify training or knowledge gaps. When agents know how they are being measured and receive specific feedback, they feel empowered and begin to self-motivate. As a result, their satisfaction and loyalty increase—which in turn reduces turnover and training costs. A winning formula for everyone!

Interaction analysis also provides a window into all the positive sentiment interactions that can be used as examples and performance-based rewards to keep employees motivated during this time of change.

Use interaction analytics to your advantage

This is just the tip of what interaction analytics can uncover for your contact center. It also provides capabilities to drive strategic business outcomes, like first contact resolution, to create high-impact improvements, mitigates compliance risk, and offers sentiment and frustration insights related to channels, teams, agent skills and products to name a few. So, during this time of unpredictability and expanded workloads, create some stability and efficiency by using interaction analytics to keep your contact center in peak performance.