4th May 2017 – In the digital era, properly qualified and skilled employees are more important than ever. Finding such employees is one of the key challenges facing contact centre managers – as revealed by recent trend research conducted by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) in collaboration with Damovo. The survey was conducted at CCW 2017, the international convention and exhibition for customer service, communication and contact centres that took place in Berlin earlier this year.
The research also found that many contact centre decision makers are considering how they can enable their employees to correctly use digital technologies in order to respond to queries more quickly and professionally. Today customers generally communicate through more than one communication channel. This means that the establishment of a fully integrated omnichannel contact centre is the best way to meet customer needs.
The impact of digitalistion presents both opportunities and challenges for contact centre decision makers. They need to look at how they communicate with customers, and then realign their approach both technically and organizationally. These changes are not so much about replacing contact center agents with self-service and virtual agents (chat bots), but rather about training employees, so they’re able to respond to every customer demand.
Dr. Andreas Stiehler of PAC: “The results of the Damovo survey that was conducted amongst contact centre decision makers reveal that the biggest challenge in 2017 is training employees in such a way that they become experienced consultants and true service heroes.”
In order to turn employees into true service heroes, Damovo and PAC offer the following five tips:
- Turn employees into well-trained omnichannel consultants by giving them access to information from all customer sources – both online and offline
- Don’t just introduce video chat as a separate, new channel. Fully integrate it into the contact centre and use it to innovate the way services are delivered.
- Use modern application integration opportunities to optimise processes in the contact centre environment and support the call centre employee with dynamic manuals.
- Create an active dialogue with the top management and departments about innovating customer service solutions, and develop central coordination for digitisation projects.
- Turn professional acceptance management into an integral part of the digitization activities in the contact center environment.
Carl Mühler, Managing Director, Damovo DACH: “These results show that functionalities such as video chat, co-browsing and document sharing are becoming the focus areas of the contact centre manager. In all types of digitisation, however, one thing remains the same: doing business involves people and it’s based on trust. Contact centre managers are aware of this. Their answers in our survey demonstrate that cost reduction isn’t the only challenge within their companies. Training employees is an issue as well.”
The complete survey is available on: http://dialog.damovo.de/ccwtrendanalysis2017.
About the survey
In February 2017, Damovo collaborated with PAC to conduct a survey among visitors of the Damovo stand at the CCW trade show. 85 visitors took part in the survey, among them were managing directors, contact center managers, team and project managers, IT managers, customer service managers and sales and marketing managers who were connected to contact centers.