No matter where your contact center team is physically located, bringing out their best performance can be a big challenge. Adding remote work or a hybrid setup to the mix can make things even tougher. But does it have to? Why Agents Want To Work Remotely — And Why You Should Let Them Remote and hybrid work are no longer hard-to-find benefits in customer support centers. In our 2022 study of contact centers in the United States and Canada, nearly 60% reported using a hybrid work model, while almost 40% of service centers were entirely remote.  Elsewhere, the International Labor Organizati ..read more

Working with virtual teams of agents in your contact center can sometimes mean you feel disconnected from them — or even worried that you aren’t able to properly manage their performance.  Those concerns might be why almost half of the contact center leaders in our 2022 remote work research study told us that they’re bringing agents back to the office this year.  Not being in the same space as your agents means you have to go the extra mile to keep team communication, training, and motivation running smoothly. Fortunately, there are solutions to help address your concerns, and we’ve ..read more

Let’s face it, the call center of yesteryear is not wholly relevant when looking at customer service operations today.  Even the terms “call center” and “contact center” are called into question, given the images they evoke of rows of agents in cubicles lined up to fill a room. For convenience, I’ll use the term “contact center,” but what does a modern contact center or customer support center look like? More and more, businesses are leveling up their customer experience and employee experience game. They’re offering digital contact options to customers, supporting fully remote workforces ..read more

During my career in workforce management, call avoidance was always an issue — regardless of the location of the business, the nature of the business, or the location of the agent.  Call avoidance, now known as interaction avoidance, denotes the steps an agent takes to avoid handling a customer interaction.  It can take time and resources to determine whether actual interaction avoidance has taken place, but, ultimately, identifying instances of interaction avoidance can save your company money.  What Is Interaction Avoidance? Before the digital era, interaction avoidance primar ..read more

These are difficult times, and our anxious customers need us more than ever. Some of them  need help with a simple task, like “How do I add a new driver to my auto insurance policy?” Others need help solving a problem: “Why was I charged twice for inflight WiFi?”  All of our customers need our empathy. They need us to infuse our emails, chats, and social media responses with words that demonstrate we understand what they are feeling, we see things from their point of view, and we care. How Do People Respond Without Empathy? We’ve all received no-empathy responses from customer servic ..read more

When it comes to call avoidance (or, more accurately these days, interaction avoidance), you usually know it when you see it. Unless you don’t.  It’s easier than you think to misjudge an agent in an interaction, so I’ve assembled examples of interaction avoidance along with actions you should take when it occurs. We’ll also look at instances that are actually legitimate issues that an agent shouldn’t be penalized for.  Call Avoidance Examples And How To Spot It  During my tenure as a WFM professional, I would occasionally audit the agents, and, if the agent passed with no indica ..read more

Long-term capacity planning needs a serious overhaul, and the best strategy for a turnaround is a radical one. If your full-time employee count (FTE) is consistently under or over your annual capacity plan, you need Radically Operationalized Capacity Planning. While this approach may require entirely new thinking for some contact centers, its potential benefits are significant— and worth the shift. Why Overhaul Capacity Planning Now? Today, hiring and business are dynamic, and nearly everything around us is in a constant state of flux. That’s why yesterday’s static approach to capacity plannin ..read more

Call avoidance is a common issue in contact centers and must be dealt with to ensure a positive experience for your customers. But agents can quickly become frustrated and overwhelmed when dealing with irate customers and high contact volumes, leading them to avoid interactions. While the issue is not unusual, it’s easier to manage if you have a solid call avoidance policy in place. When you create the right policy, you’ll get call avoidance rates down — to the benefit of both your customer satisfaction metrics and your agents’ experiences. Customer Rage And Pandemic Rage Research from the Cal ..read more

Any good product manager will tell you that a big part of their job is forming a deep understanding of customer needs. User idea suggestion portals are a helpful tool in doing that, but they might not be the best (or only) one for the job. What Are Idea Portals And How Do They Work? UserVoice popularized the concept in 2008, but now there are many providers of idea management software, used by companies like Spotify, Airbnb, and Microsoft. Most feature idea portals have the same core mechanics: Users visit a dedicated website with a list of feature ideas from other users (and sometimes the co ..read more

“Time is money” is a phrase attributed to Benjamin Franklin, first appearing in The American Instructor, a book published in 1748. For contact center managers, this phrase rings in their heads each time they create a forecast, build a schedule, or track schedule adherence.  Working efficiently becomes even more important when costs are rising, agents are hard to hire, and customer service expectations are higher than ever before. On top of that, most customer support centers now offer service channels beyond voice —  such as e-mail, chat, and messaging — that require different ways o ..read more