What does a good experience look like for those on the front line of customer service? In the last 18 months, the role of the contact centre has been elevated and the teams kept busier than ever. At the same time, businesses have invested into tools and applications for their customers, from self-serve portals to multichannel experiences. But what does this all mean for the advisors?
In new research from the CCMA, supported by Colt, Atos and NICE CXOne, we found that technology and the integration of different tools can have a major impact on not just their day to day job satisfaction, but their likelihood of remaining in the role for the long term.
The full report is available to download here and covers the views of 750 contact centre employees across France, Germany and the UK, supported by focus group interviews.
It’s clear that the level of technology adoption and integration applied to customer experience has yet to reach the advisors – who are faced with a growing number of applications to use that are not well understood or integrated. In fact 39% of frontline advisors in the UK, 41% in Germany and 34% in France report that they use too many applications.
The impact of this can be seen in staff retention – over 25% of advisors said they plan to leave in the next 12 months and, for the UK, the 4th highest reason for planning to leave in the next 12 months is difficulties in using applications.
As contact centres look to integrate more channels and deploy more applications, the report highlights some clear opportunities and ways forward.
1) Enable the team with technology. Automation tools such as advisor-facing chatbots, speech and text analytics play a pivotal role to help manage internal support demand and empower frontline teams.
2) Real integration will reduce stress. Fragmentation across the systems and applications ecosystem is a real problem – a more focused, integrated approach to growth will reduce handling time and colleagues’ stress.
3) Connections are key – employees really value a sense of connection with their colleagues and so this needs to be enabled no matter where they are based.
We’ve supported this research to help Colt and its customers get a much better understanding of what really matters to advisors. By better understanding the advisor experience we can help our customers deliver a better experience to not just their staff, but their customers.
One way in which we do this is, together with Atos and NICE CXOne, we offer a cloud-based platform that optimises the experience for customers, by giving contact centre agents the ability to serve customers effectively from anywhere. It provides customers with the tools and data-driven insights to support their customer experience strategy and organisational outcomes, with a productive and fully remote workforce.
Working with our partners, Atos and Nice CXOne, and with the CCMA, meant we could reach key markets across Europe, get a detailed understanding of the end users for our CCaaS product and hear first hand from call centre leaders. As we continue to update and evolve our solutions, this level of insight is invaluable.
Find out more here or download the full CCMA report here.
Tim Cook
28 October 2021
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