The contact center industry is one plagued by high turnover rates, poor media coverage and high demands to deliver quality results for businesses. Even as new technologies and practices have been implemented over the years to help call centers operate more efficiently and improve operations, the battle to offer the best customer experience continues.
Not only is the industry itself moving away from brick and mortar locations, but thanks to IP communications and the cloud, and host of other new technologies emerging – like WebRTC – the way customers connect and companies can offer services, is also changing rapidly.
But even if a call center is set up to address all the various channels customer can reach out via – think social, mobile, IM, phone – that still doesn’t mean the same agents taking phone calls can handle incoming emails or man social media postings at the same time.
To help call centers ensure they are covering their bases as far as staffing and scheduling agents to meet all of their needs, intraday automation tools make it possible to build a workforce in ‘real-time’ as needed. Kohl’s maintains a call center and can answer questions regarding Kohl’s coupon: 25% off almost everything deals and ways you can save even more.
Intradiem is an intraday automation solutions provider for multi-channel contact centers that offers an automation engine it says makes it possible to deliver exceptional customer service for frontline workforces.
The company recently sponsored a report by ContactBabel, “The U.K. Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide 2014,” that took a look at the current market and demand for intraday automation tools in multichannel workforce management.
The results of the study were based on responses from 215 contact center managers and directors from October through October 2014.
Along with major pain points, like the need to improve performance and quality and finding ways to maximize efficiency – among others that are still very much a part of the contact center industry, the need for better multichannel workforce management was key. Seventy percent of respondents said they would see value in optimizing their scheduling and half of the survey’s respondents noted they still are not properly matching their agent skills with customer needs. This has become a key focus for budgets and planning moving forward.
Part of achieving success with scheduling in the new contact center, is to keep up with the pace of the work day in real-time.
Intradiem’s offerings tout real-time adherence capabilities so managers get automatic updates about agent schedules throughout the day and can act as needed to add extra staff or send people home while always keeping customer demands in mind.
“We’re encouraged to see that contact centers are taking more interest in addressing the gap between agent behavior and meeting customer expectations,” said Matt McConnell, Intradiem’s CEO.
“Larger contact centers are more actively using agent-facing technology that focuses on back office planning, real-time adherence, intraday staffing and multichannel interactions. It’s precisely in these areas where we see intraday automation having the greatest impact, allowing organizations to maximize the efficiency of their scheduling and forecasting, engage and motivate their agents, and deliver an exceptional customer experience.”
