Act 1: The quest for the "Zen Screen"
Several years ago, Xavier Niel stated in the Society magazine: "Employees in call centers are the workers of the 21st century. It is a horrible job. The job they do is the worst of jobs."
At ViaDialog, this caught our attention because we have been familiar with this industry since 2005. We therefore decided to analyze this situation in detail to gain a clearer perspective…
A clear and undeniable observation
A quick tour within a contact center is enough to see that tele-agents spend their days juggling between different application windows, their phone handset, their headset, their keyboard, and their smartphone.
Each of them opens at least 5 standalone software, this number sometimes reaching up to 10, to switch from one contact channel to another (telephone, email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, etc.) or to navigate through CRM, ticketing, ERP, and other in-house software. A real obstacle course, rhythmically punctuated by high tempos, First Call Resolution objectives, maximum waiting time not to exceed, and maximum processing duration to respect along with satisfaction indices to achieve at all costs!
Whether they are on-site, teleworking, or offshore, the same labor and the same weariness. Not to mention the time spent in training, steering committees, and daily debriefings. And so, yes, call center agents are indeed the new workers of modern times.
Their assembly lines are now queues of customers, and if their tools are no longer sheet metal presses, they are now sophisticated software. And that’s where the problem lies. Each window is a standalone software, having its dropdown menus, its graphics, its notifications, and … its own logic. The journeys to perform business actions are long, the re-entry of information frequent, and the information fragmented.
Offering customers multiple contact points, whether by phone, email, SMS, or even WhatsApp has become essential to provide the best possible customer experience, but this requires deploying dedicated software for each channel.
To have a 360° customer view, one must know the full state of their consumption, the reason for the contact of the day, be able to access the history of all previous contacts, and be capable of tracing the thread of conversations conducted by email, chat, etc., to finally reconstruct their navigation before landing at the customer relationship center, on the other end of the line are impatient customers demanding effective and immediate solutions.
Harmful consequences for contact center agents…
This situation engenders two major consequences: permanent stress for the agent; recurrent dissatisfaction for the customer.
Commerce is becoming increasingly demanding and competition is always tougher, agents must master all these components to access the right information, take the correct actions, and report back without delay. The self-care certainly spares them a cohort of interactions, but it must be noted that the phone remains the royal route for quality service, and the one preferred by the majority of customers.
At the same time, customers are a click away from another provider, share their experiences on forums, rate customer services and products through publicly shared reviews, and never hesitate to harshly criticize any merchant who takes too long to respond or replies off-topic.
Faced with this observation, we at ViaDialog have thought a lot about how to resolve these frictions. And in our quest for the "Zen Screen", we found truly innovative and original ideas….
To be continued
Article update: December 27, 2021
