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Our lives have been disrupted, both at home and work. And the rapid pace of information we are getting about COVID-19 worldwide both via traditional news outlets and social media creates an even more heightened sense of concern. COVID-19 is challenging for everyone, and especially for organizations who play important roles in supporting their communities. COVID-19 contact center Business Continuity Planning has taken top priority.

Jeff Kennon, Director of Customer Experience for NeoNova, a customer support enterprise servicing some of the world’s leading internet service and telecom providers, says that leveraging a workforce management platform helped delight both customers and agents. He explains how opening new channels has made for a great customer experience.

Every contact center leader climbs a steep hill when trying to meet performance goals within budget. It doesn’t help that it’s hard to find, train, and retain qualified agents. Leaders face markets with historically low unemployment and plenty of competition that offers attractive compensation (e.g., Amazon). Even when they get folks to sign on, training takes too long, and time to proficiency can be even longer… if the agents stay long enough to get there! As our latest survey shows, attrition is the #1 challenge contact centers face in 2020.

Mapping the relationship between customer demand, contact queues and workforce planning needs has never been more challenging. The number of variables and dependencies that workforce managers must account for is constantly increasing. Customer needs and agent skills grow ever more intricate and effect one another in ways that are difficult to predict. So it’s understandable that pinpointing exactly how to get an appropriately skilled agent to each customer at the right time can sometimes leave workforce managers feeling like they’re just spinning their wheels.

What comes first — agent experience or customer experience? More and more, contact centre leaders are seeing why you can’t achieve maximum results on efforts to improve customer experience (CX) without a deliberate focus on improving agent experience (AX). And the improvements you make to your agent experience can have a profound impact on your contact centre’s customer experience.

The onset of the COVID-19 virus, also known as the Coronavirus, has impacted the contact center in a way never before experienced in the nearly 50-year history of the industry. Business as usual has been disrupted in ways not thought possible since the “Great Recession” of 2008, yet contact centers are still being tasked with maintaining operational best practices and optimizing the customer experience under extremely difficult circumstances.

Here’s a dirty little secret. Despite the industry’s focus on the customer experience (CX), contacts still take too long and don’t reach closure often enough. Generally speaking, it’s not the agents’ fault. They really want to help customers. They also want to achieve the center’s targets for Service Level (SL), Average Handle Time (AHT), and First Contact Resolution (FCR), among others. What holds them back? Too often, technology, or the lack thereof.