One window, one screen: The path to agent productivity

Publication date: February 2022 Author: David Myron, Principal Analyst Business Platforms & Applications

One window, one screen: The path to agent productivity Why, after the start of COVID-19, organizations must focus on handle time.

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One window, one screen: The path to agent productivity

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Contents Summary

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New developents prompt cloud investments

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Embrace omnichannel and self-help options

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Connecting the dots with artificial intelligence

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Conclusion

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Appendix

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Summary The impact of COVID-19 on businesses has been so widely spread and deeply felt that it has affected their employees, customers, processes, and technologies. It has forced them to re-evaluate everything from their top business challenges to the strategies they use to address them.

The contact center is no exception, and savvy business leaders are changing the way they measure contact center performance – starting with what agent productivity means today and what success looks like. It’s no longer enough for contact center executives to solely focus their attention on the interaction timer on agents’ screens. It goes much deeper and wider than that and opens a whole world of opportunities facilitated by cloud contact center deployments, omnichannel strategies, automated self-service, and investments in artificial intelligence. Leaders must now seek ways to strike a balance between agent productivity and engagement to keep customers coming back.

Ultimately, everything is ripe for re-evaluation – from strategies and tactics, and from software to hardware.

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New developments prompt cloud investments COVID-19 and the subsequent stay-at-home mandates created a new way of working for contact centers. Because of these mandates, nearly 75% of customer service agents were forced to work from home in the first half of 2020. Omdia estimates that about 50% of agents are still working from home heading into 2022. It’s clear that COVID’s impact on contact centers has been, and will continue to be, long-lasting and highly disruptive.

The centers that struggled the most were those housed in premises-based environments. They didn’t offer digital channel options for customer self-service and they had little or no experience in managing remote workers.

A move to the cloud and digital channels, originally scheduled for five to eight years in the future, were, by necessity, accomplished in a few days to a week by the centers that could do it. Their priority was to transition to the cloud as soon as possible so agents could work remotely. However, once there, the cloud presented a slew of opportunities to help them solve their most pressing business and customer needs.

Take, for example, the two most prioritized business challenges—increasing operating efficiency and improving customer experience, according to 46% and 42% of organizations, respectively, in Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey (see Figure 1). While these two priorities often compete for business leaders’ attention and budgets, a unified cloud-native contact center solution can address both concerns.

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Figure 1: Increasing operating efficiency is the top concern for businesses globally

Top 3 business challenges for 2022

Increasing operating efficiency Reducing operating expenditure

Increasing revenue/budget growth Improving customer/citizen experience Meeting regulatory demands Improving operational resilience 0.00%

Top Priority

10.00%

20.00%

Second Priority

30.00%

40.00%

50.00%

Third Priority

(Source: Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey. Sample size: 4,757)

It might seem logical that focusing solely on agent productivity would address both business priorities; however, to get the best results, contact center leaders should, instead, focus on managing handle time. This opens more opportunities to improve many of the metrics they measure, such as customer satisfaction, speed to answer, first-call resolution, and abandonment rates.

To illustrate how a unified cloud contact center platform could solve both business concerns, picture an international fashion retailer that needs to quickly cut call center wait times without hiring additional staff. A close look at its agents’ processes reveals they regularly toggle through a labyrinth of windows to find all the contact center applications, databases, and communication channels needed to help customers, which creates a lot of lag time on each call. And it creates a poor agent – and, ultimately, customer – experience.

Imagine if agents could access all the customer interactions, CRM information, and survey data they need from one easy-to-use window, within one unified cloud-native contact center platform, on one screen. By simply streamlining this process for agents, the center would be able to: © 2022 Omdia.

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One window, one screen: The path to agent productivity

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•

lower average handle time;

•

increase average speed to answer;

•

reduce call abandonment rates; and

•

cut costs, improve agent morale, and enhance customer satisfaction.

As more contact center leaders see the value of cloud contact center solutions, more are investing in them. According to Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey, 29% of respondents are planning a strategic, or new, investment into cloud contact center software in 2022, while 34% plan to make a minor investment or update. Combined, 63% of organizations plan to increase their cloud contact center investments in 2022 (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: 86% of organizations plan to invest in cloud contact center technology in 2022.

2022 cloud contact center investment plans Do not have No investment planned

Strategic investment planned

6% 8% 29%

Maintain existing investment

23%

34% Minor investment planned (Source: Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey. Sample size: 4,757)

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Cloud investment recommendations

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Enterprises not either partly or fully in the cloud with customer service operations should start trials or move to a cloud operation as soon as possible. This could be accomplished by adding a cloud system at one local facility or adding a contact center application to their premises-based system. Once confident with a cloud provider and cloud service, they should expand to full cloud service as soon as possible.

•

Executives who are ready to invest in a cloud contact center solution should select a vendor that can help them move to the cloud as smoothly as possible when ready, as well as provide a full complement of customer service options, including multichannel/omnichannel solutions and self-service applications powered by machine learning capabilities.

•

Additionally, they should establish a long-term plan for their cloud investments. Their enterprise customer engagement plan must include the unification of the enterprise communication stack under a cloud-based management umbrella. This will enable the interception, assessment, and transfer of transactional information merged with AI, CRM, customer data platform, and personalization capabilities to gradually transition to the vision of the contact center of the future that will enable big data operations.

•

In addition, to maximizing investments in the cloud, enterprises should assess the viability of a cloud-first endpoint and operating system to match, like Google’s Chrome OS and Chromebook devices. By moving contact center agents to a cloud-first OS and associated device, businesses can ensure an unmatched level of security for their business and customer data, further improve agent productivity, and rapidly deploy and manage their users and devices, which is particularly important in high-turnover contact center environments.

Embrace omnichannel and self-help options For voice-only contact center systems, there remains a need to add rollover options during periods of high call volumes or major disruptive events when live agent coverage may not be available to provide real-time voice services (i.e., in the form of email, SMS, AI-driven bots, etc). To guarantee flexibility, especially in the face of significant and unexpected changes, enterprises should provide multichannel access to customer service. Voice systems plus multichannel solutions are far better equipped to ensure service.

Already, 16% of organizations have completed their omnichannel customer engagement strategy and 28% stated their omnichannel efforts are well advanced. In fact, this pie chart (Figure 3) shows that 44% of organizations are either well advanced or have completed their omnichannel engagement strategy, while another 44% are either in the early stages or in progress of completing their omnichannel customer engagement strategy.

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Figure 3: At least 44% of organizations have a well advanced omnichannel strategy.

Omnichannel Customer (or Citizen) Engagement Strategy Not Relevant 4% Not Started 8%

Complete 16%

Early Stages 15% Well Advanced 28% In Progress 29%

(Source: Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey)

Automation and self-service are part of the new standard When planning their omnichannel strategy, contact center leaders should look to add automation where appropriate. Contact centers struggle to find enough qualified agents to quickly address customer service issues, particularly during busy periods. Also, humans are fallible and can’t always provide the best responses while adhering to all of a company’s policies, regulations, and compliance requirements. Additionally, new and evolving customers who lived through the pandemic have gained a more favorable impression of digital customer service channels and selfhelp applications. They appreciate the value of digital channels and are more willing to use them to quickly answer their questions and resolve issues. This enables companies to significantly lighten the support load of live agents, especially when machine learning is built-in and properly utilized to make self-service applications smarter over time.

According to Omdia research, 28% of global IT professionals have a strategic investment planned for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customer service automation in 2022, while 36% have a minor © 2022 Omdia.

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investment planned. This means that 64% of IT professionals plan to make at least a minor investment in SaaS customer service automation in 2022 (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Most organizations plan to invest in SaaS customer service automation in 2022.

2022 SaaS Customer service automation investment plans Do not have

No investment planned

Strategic investment planned

6% 7% 28%

Maintain existing investment

23%

36% Minor investment planned (Source: Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey. Sample size: 4,757)

Customer service automation can come in different forms and channels, but one emerging solution is intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), or automated chatbots.

With SMS and messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, billions of people globally use some form of messaging to communicate. Chatbots enable organizations to cost effectively automate the handling of repetitive, routine interactions with customers in a conversational way, and they require absolutely no training for customers to use them.

According to Omdia research, 86% of companies surveyed plan to invest in automated chatbots in 2022, and 28% are planning a strategic investment (see Figure 5). © 2022 Omdia.

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Figure 5: More than 75% of organizations plan to invest in chatbots in 2022.

2022 IVA/chatbot investment plans Do not have

No investment planned

Strategic investment planned

6% 8% 28%

Maintain existing investment

24%

34% Minor investment planned (Source: Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey. Sample size: 4,757)

There’s good reason for this level of interest. Chatbots can resolve customer problems within minutes, as opposed to email support or social media support, which can take hours or even days for a resolution. Because of their availability, accuracy, and efficiency, companies deploying chatbots are noticing higher customer satisfaction scores, more leads, and increased conversion rates. Chatbots can also help gather customer data and statistics such as the most common problems customers run into, preferences, and more. This insight can be used to create more informative website pages, such as a more detailed FAQ page or specific information about certain products or services that customers often ask about.

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Tips for omnichannel and digital assistant success

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Enterprises will need a well-defined process automation roadmap. They should plot the most significant areas of the business that are suited for automation and assign a focus group of business process owners to discuss and prepare a future blueprint with strategic objectives in mind. Also, ensure support for human interaction when necessary and that data privacy standards are being met with transparency about how that is being achieved.

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Chatbots can provide measurable improvements in availability, accuracy, and efficiency, as they can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can quickly leverage data from various sources, such as knowledgebases and historical and annotated call data. While chatbots can be very effective, they aren’t a customer support panacea. They excel at automating the handling of routine questions, but when it comes to more complex problems, they must transfer the interaction to a live agent. That’s why the goal of chatbots shouldn’t be to replace agents, but to free agents to address the most serious and complicated customer problems.

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Contact centers that have yet to invest in chatbots should start small. Test and use results to expand outward across the enterprise and customer engagement channels. Also, look beyond point solutions to strategize how to engage the wider enterprise and to interact with users through the entire customer journey from the initial contact to after sales care. This will help to enable frictionless customer experience.

Connecting the dots with artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence will become more pervasive throughout enterprises and contact centers. A customer can engage in hundreds of micro moments along their journey. When it comes to optimizing each micro moment, the key is ensuring that the consumer journey is tailored to the platform or device they are using. AI contextualizes and dives into the micro moments, targeting customers’ needs along the journey.

To be successful, customer touchpoints must be embedded with machine learning algorithms that can be used to identify the patterns in the customer data from different sources and can help correlate a customer behavior to a matching persona in real time and then be layered with AI to enable automation and intelligence throughout an enterprise.

This can provide a holistic customer experience throughout the customer journey, from the first touch to the final sale and beyond. For instance, the traditional approach to predicting customer lifetime value is based solely on customers’ historical data. But customer lifetime value models powered by artificial intelligence take into consideration a combination of factors, including the monetary value of the purchase and inference of future actions, for example, to make better predictions.

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When done well, enterprises can leverage AI to respond to key moments in real time and proactively anticipate customers’ next moves, understand which channels they intend to use, and be ready with relevant content, offers, or remedies.

Machine learning algorithms help marketers and customer experience managers identify trends, patterns, insights, commonalities, and abnormalities in data. After the data is gathered and sorted, it can be analyzed to ensure that the best content and messages are not only reaching but are also positively affecting the appropriate audiences along the journey.

According to Omdia research, 26% of companies surveyed are planning a strategic investment in artificial intelligence in 2022, and 37% are planning a minor upgrade to their existing investments, totaling 63% that are planning to invest in artificial intelligence in 2022 (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: In 2022, 26% of organizations have a strategic investment plan in place for AI.

2022 next-best-action marketing/AI Do not have No investment planned

Strategic investment planned

6% 7% 26%

Maintain existing investment

24%

37% Minor investment planned (Source: Omdia’s 2022 IT Enterprise Insights survey. Sample size: 4,757)

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Going back to the fashion retailer example, imagine if the retailer were able to leverage fully integrated omnichannel support, self-service automation, and machine learning capabilities. The customer could start a conversation with an automated chatbot, which can conduct an account lookup and try to answer the customer’s question by searching the company’s knowledgebase. If unsuccessful, the chatbot can transfer the conversation and customer information to a live agent, who can pick up where the chatbot left off, without asking the customer to repeat any information.

As with the earlier example, the chat would appear in the same window the agent is already using to support the customer, so there’s no need to toggle between windows.

By leveraging omnichannel support and self-service automation with machine learning, the retailer would notice the following benefits:

•

routine inquiries are handled by the bot, giving agents more time to focus on more complex inquiries and

•

agents can pick up where bots leave off, so customers don’t have to repeat information or troubleshooting steps.

By focusing on handle time, the retailer can think more broadly about customer handle time, which includes automated self-help and live agent support, to improve operating efficiencies and enhance customer experiences.

Best practices to obtain long-term value from AI

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Seeking greater intelligence requires clean data. When seeking AI developments, it is helpful to remember that data comes first. Enterprises must conduct data cleansing and tagging before initiating their AI efforts.

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Additionally, enterprises will need integrated, unified customer data. Customer data management is fundamental to the effective use of AI, which needs to be networked across customer journeys to orchestrate relevance at each step. Unless brands have unified historical, transactional, and behavioral knowledge and data about what customers do at each stage of their journeys, brands will not succeed at delivering personalized and relevant interactions.

When businesses have properly integrated data, they can recognize who they are interacting with and respond appropriately.

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Processes must be re-engineered. Identify areas of the enterprise that are affected and design or re-engineer related processes. Enterprises must clearly define their programs and retrain customer-facing employees to assume other higher-value-added tasks. Forgetting people, and their interactions with AI, would lead to the derailing of AI technology as a vehicle for positive change.

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Getting value out of AI requires a well-rounded workforce. Employees must have the proper mix of technology and business skills. Enterprises must prepare their teams for the impact AI will have on skillsets, expertise, and the nature of work. Consider how their roles evolve and how their jobs will change.

Bring it all together: Cloud transformation with Edify and Google Chrome OS Edify on Chrome banishes legacy contact center complexity by letting users interact with colleagues and customers via phone, text, email, and video just like they do with friends – in a single window – with the simplicity, security, and ease today’s enterprises need.

With Edify on Chrome and Chrome OS devices, users can:

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Use one window for all contact center and unified communications applications, databases, and channels to improve productivity and experience.

•

Protect their enterprise’s digital assets with OS, browser, application, firmware, data, and device security.

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Get up and running in minutes on one cloud-native solution inside of one screen without sacrificing quality or capability.

•

Easily work at the office, from home, and on the go, making work-from-anywhere an efficient, reliable, and secure reality.

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Conclusion While the voice channel will remain in high demand, it can no longer be the only channel offered.

Customers now expect digital channels, 24×7 service, and personalization. Plus, they will be more accepting of automated self-service and automated chatbot services. To keep pace with the shifts in consumer behavior since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises must evolve with customer expectations and give employees the software and hardware tools to do so.

Additionally, contact center leaders must continue to improve operating efficiencies by maintaining a strong focus on handle time. This means agent productivity and includes all customer engagements with live and automated customer support. Taking this broader view of customer engagements enables leaders to leverage cloud contact center deployments, omnichannel strategies, automated self-service, and investments in artificial intelligence to address today’s top business concerns.

The centers that most effectively manage handle times to improve operating efficiencies and enhance customer experiences will realize a distinct competitive advantage.

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One window, one screen: The path to agent productivity

Appendix Author

David Myron Principal Analyst, Business Platforms & Applications customersuccess@omdia.com

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One window, one screen: The path to agent productivity

Get in touch

Omdia consulting

www.omdia.com askananalyst@omdia.com

Omdia is a market-leading data, research, and consulting business focused on helping digital service providers, technology companies, and enterprise decision-makers thrive in the connected digital economy.

Through our global base of analysts, we offer expert analysis and strategic insight across the IT, telecoms, and media industries.

We create business advantage for our customers by providing actionable insight to support business planning, product development, and go-tomarket initiatives.

Our unique combination of authoritative data, market analysis, and vertical industry expertise is designed to empower decision-making, helping our clients profit from new technologies and capitalize on evolving business models.

Omdia is part of Informa Tech, a B2B information services business serving the technology, media, and telecoms sector. The Informa group is listed on the London Stock Exchange.

We hope that this analysis will help you make informed and imaginative business decisions. If you have further requirements, Omdia’s consulting team may be able to help your company identify future trends and opportunities.

About Edify Edify connects businesses with customers and employees with each other, making business communications as easy as personal ones. Its flagship product, Edify Huddle CX, unites contact center (CCaaS), unified communications (UCaaS), and real-time communications platform (CPaaS/API) functionality in a cloud-native solution that lets users move seamlessly among channels within one conversation, just as we do on our phones. Edify removes all the risk once associated with moving to the cloud by delivering global availability, real-time redundancy, nowaste pricing, and a 100% SLA uptime guarantee. Learn more at edify.cx.

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One window, one screen: The path to agent productivity

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