Blog

The prevalence of digital banking and remote banking via call centers requires new and convenient ways to authenticate customer identity. Even though bank customers agree with the need for security, they do not want to undergo excessive authentication before they can accomplish the simplest transactions in their own account.

After spending the last couple of crazy months executing all of our contact center business continuity plans in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on what’s next for the work from home call center. Our CEO Paul Jarman has a saying that he’s used often these days and I think it applies broadly to any business or contact center leader when thinking about how to manage through this uncertainty: “we’re going to be short-term realistic and long-term optimistic.”

Coaching isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Just as a good teacher tailors instruction to the pupil, taking into consideration whether the student is a visual, auditory, reading/writing or kinesthetic learner, an effective coach considers how each agent learns best.

Shawn Smith joined the NUG board in 2020 as the Analytics Chair.

Since the dawn of the contact center, there has never been a larger impact than the one we face with COVID-19. Many contact centers unprepared for a dramatic increase in customer contacts have scrambled to develop work from home plans and ramped up the use of self-service and automation.

Maintaining a strong performance management process with remote contact center agents can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. On a regular day in the contact center, a supervisor will usually walk the floor, check on performance levels and coach agents face-to-face. In a remote contact center, performance management processes look a bit different, but the fundamentals remain the same.

A typical 500-agent contact center allocates approximately $2M a year to coaching contact center agents, but leaders often struggle to measure the ROI of coaching. With vast amounts of data available from evaluations, third-party assessments, automatic call distributors (ACDs) and more, leaders also find it difficult to understand what they need to focus on to affect their most mission-critical KPIs.