Intradiem was a proud sponsor of the Contact Center Conference & Expo held in San Diego March 18-20. The show was nothing short of successful for both attendees and presenters. With a huge focus on customer experience, many speakers were able to share successful strategies used by some of today’s largest brands. Some of the highlights included sessions from Bristol-Myers Squibb, World Travel Holdings, Cox Communications, and Blinds.com. Examples of topics covered included:
- Celebrate! Lessons Learned from the World’s Most Admired Organizations
- Managing Big Data in the Contact Center
- Ways to Deliver Brag-Worthy Customer Service in your Contact Center
My major takeaways were:
1. Big data is more than a buzzword.
There’s no doubt about the trails of data that exist today. However, what do we as contact center professionals need to know to make it meaningful? During the panel discussion, there were three main points that caught my attention.
1. Know what questions to ask and not just expect answers.
2. Make data actionable by using triggers to quickly respond.
3. Avoid functional silos to make the data work for you — you can’t do anything with data if you don’t know about it.
2. “Why fit in when you were born to stand out.” (Dr. Seuss)
Despite what we may think, there is existing contact center benchmark data that proves the distinction between great and average contact centers. According to Aberdeen Research (download the Research Brief), 75% of companies are driving results with intraday contact center workforce management. This can be defined as: A broad category or processes and technologies that enable contact centers to react to changing conditions throughout the day to optimize agent productivity and performance. Year-over-year, intraday management users were able to meet more quality SLAs and improve AHT, FCR and customer satisfaction compared to non-users.
In summary, intraday management allows best-in-class contact centers to:
- Increase agent occupancy and reduce labor cost
- Reduce agent churn
- Reduce manual intraday management activities
- Improve service levels
3. Social customer support is a critical piece to the customer experience puzzle.
Michael Pace, Principal of The Pace of Service, discussed how you must meet your customers where the are to optimize FCR. By maximizing all of your support channels to drive First Preferred Contact Solution Resolution, you can improve both customer satisfaction and reduce your operational costs. But where do you begin? By setting up a team capable of social interaction with your customers.
This year’s conference made it clear that contact centers across multiple verticals are feverishly working to improve operations and customer experience. More importantly, finding case studies to show the way seemed to be a common theme among attendees.
Did you attend this year’s CCA Spring conference? What were your key takeaways? I look forward to reading your comments below.
