The industrialization of customer relations centers: what are the consequences?
Dec. 10, 2021
We've all had contact with a customer service department. Whether for a purchase or after-sales service. By phone, by e-mail or on social networks, makingomnichannel communication ever more vital for companies. At the end of the phone or at the touch of a keyboard, precious help is offered with a well-honed, perfectly mastered discourse...
And yet. Psychological distress is an integral part of the contact center landscape. A booming industry since the 90s, contact centers have enabled companies to streamline their customer relations through greater availability and personalization. However, this industrialization of services tends inexorably to create a fragmented work environment, akin to modern-day Taylorism. Xavier Niel has even declared that "call center employees are the workers of the 21st century [...]. The job they do is the worst job of all."
High work rates, strict daily targets, constant stress, alarming staff turnover... Let's take a closer look at the daily lives of contact center agents, and the solutions that can be found for them.
Worst job ever?
The facts are clear. Contact center jobs are often precarious, repetitive and stressful. Let's not forget that these structures were initially developed around a strong desire to reduce costs for companies. To achieve this, contact centers try to build an organizational model combining new technologies and human skills to produce high-quality remote communication services. Similar to the frenetic, monotonous pace of mass production lines, the work is made mind-numbing, almost turning advisors into mere executors. The pace and queues of incoming and outgoing calls follow one another endlessly on the overloaded screens of agents, whose atomized, disembodied work conveys the general idea of work undergone. In addition to providing quick answers to customers' questions, call center agents are called upon to add commercial value to their prescribed interventions by adapting to unforeseen events.
On top of this, hierarchical pressure is ever-present. Indeed, managers and supervisors use tools that enable them to monitor, in real time, the performance of their agents: number of calls in progress, call handling time, completion rate and abandonment rate where applicable... It should be stressed that opinion is divided: monitoring tools have ambivalent effects, and their impact is felt differently by advisors. Nevertheless, in most cases, the approach is no longer perceived as managerial but as totalitarian! And the consequences are clearly felt...
An irrevocable sentence!
With little commitment to their jobs, agents lose productivity - and that's where the problem lies! The lack of commitment and high turnover among advisors naturally leads toabsenteeism and staff shortages. The role of CRCs, which are supposed to relieve companies and satisfy customers, has a boomerang effect, contrary to what was intended. Contact centers are perceived as cost centers (and cost overruns!) rather than profit centers and value-added creation centers. Furthermore, it's undeniable that the quality of the work done by call center agents requires certain skills and knowledge, such as good interpersonal and linguistic skills, excellent listening skills, and a thorough knowledge of the products and services offered by the company. But when agent turnover is omnipresent, the training invested is totally wasted, forcing organizations to reinvest in training successors all over again! And the result is clear: too many inbound and outbound calls for too few staff, inexperienced agents under pressure, all leading to longer call times, highly irritating customers and longer queues.
To overcome this endless friction, we at ViaDialog wanted to breathe new life into these often agile organizations. And we succeeded.
ViaFlow, your omnichannel ally for managing customer interactions in all circumstances!
ViaFlow is the first natively omnichannel solution to handle all customer interactions through a unified interface, giving contact center agents a 360° view. They can easily switch from one channel to another, while maintaining the full contextualization of the exchange. However, agent stress and growing customer dissatisfaction are both linked to the multiplicity of applications required to respond effectively to customer requests. Today, this multiplicity is the cause of an average agent response time to a customer call of 2 min 30.
With ViaFlow, this time is reduced by 40%! What's more, ViaFlow is fully accessible remotely, in a totally secure environment, and with a small hardware footprint, making it easy for agents to set up a peaceful teleworking environment. Caller emotion detection enables emotionally unstable customers to be directed to specific queues. Self-care tools, led by call qualification voicebots such as ViaSpeech, considerably relieve agents of redundant, low value-added tasks. Last but not least, ViaFlow's dynamic supervision module enables supervisors to provide invaluable assistance to their agents during a call, by whispering answers or directly integrating the call.
To find out more, our experts are available to support you at every stage of your projects.
