Customer Engagement

Customer Service in 2013 and Beyond

With self-service channels delivering answers to simple customer service questions, complex queries will continue to require a human touch. As such, this will necessitate training, development and, in some cases, new skills as customer service staff transition their roles to become more of a knowledge worker. In today’s world, information changes quickly — in fact, over the next decade, it’s expected to amplify even further.

The same holds true for availability and access to information. The result will be smarter consumers who are even more knowledgeable about products, brands and market trends. Organizations must ensure that their customer care professionals remain in tune and are equipped to keep pace — and even stay ahead — of the information wave. As such, training and coaching as we know it will take on a new level of importance, priority and frequency.

3. Changing Roles — Agents as Knowledge Workers; At-Home Staffing Models

Studies have shown that home agents often tend to be better educated, have more experience and the ability to bring a wealth of knowledge to their positions. However, as with on-premise contact center staff, home-based agents will need to stay ahead of the customer from a knowledge standpoint, further fueling the need for remote agent management. This means the growth of technologies that support distance learning, distance monitoring and distance forecasting and scheduling.

As agents move closer to becoming knowledge workers, key management challenges will emerge. To keep them engaged, businesses will need to reinvigorate their growth and retention strategies. This may mean better benefits (such as telecommuting options), along with better training and professional development.

A trickle effect also can be expected. Along with the changing role of the contact center agent, the supervisor’s role will need to evolve, as well. Supervisors are going to need new levels of personnel management and even technical proficiencies. Not all supervisors today are tech-savvy. Based on the systems they’ll be using, they’ll need to develop new and different skills. Because today’s workforce optimization technology automates the forecasting, scheduling, call recording and analytics functions, supervisors can spend more time coaching and developing staff — an aspect that will remain critical five and 10 years down the road.

There also will need to be a fundamental shift in that, currently, there are very few programs specifically designed to train this level of management on key issues inherent in virtual center and personnel operations, information management and dispersal, and multichannel communications. Forward-thinking organizations will start putting the models and programs in place now in anticipation.

4. Mastering Multichannel Customer Service

The media that businesses use to interact with their customers continues to expand exponentially. Traditional channels like voice calls to live agents, IVR systems, text messaging, Web chat and email are giving way to conversations and engagements that happen on social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

The question then becomes, which of these forms of customer service and interaction fall under the realm of the contact center and its managers? Take, for instance, Apple’s announcement in July 2009 about the availability of the Skype application on the iPhone, minus Skype’s video capability. It is not hard to imagine an iPhone with complete Skype capability trans- forming the device into the first practical videophone/ Web browser.

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