Empowering Your Contact Center: The Inside Scoop

CCNG partner Aggregage interviews Aarde Cosseboom and Brian Morin on implementing virtual agents.

How many hours do you think your call center agents spend answering repetitive, transactional calls that don’t require human assistance? The answer may surprise you -- 75% of customers think that calling is the most effective way to get a response from you, which means your agents are spending potentially 30 hours/week on repetitive calls instead of more complex issues that require human judgment and critical thinking.

Unsurprised? Then you're probably well aware of the potential for using conversational AI to manage the calls that can be answered easily and quickly. If you're not already using conversational AI, then you may be on the fence regarding its usefulness in the field, or perhaps you're unsure about how to implement it at your company.

If this is a situation you can relate to, then listen to this in-depth conversation with TechStyle Fashion Group as they openly discuss their decision to go virtual, and the challenges they faced along the way as they dabbled with both building the omnichannel self-service platform themselves, and outsourcing the design to a partner. You will learn:

*What factors went into TechStyle's first decision between tackling internally or outsourcing to a partner
*How TechStyle saved $1.1M in their first year afterwards
* Why the performance of TechStyle's virtual agents rivals that of live agents
*And more!

Today, TechStyle Fashion Group automates millions of calls and chats each year with conversational AI. If you're ready to learn more about how you can do the same, then don't miss this webinar!

Listen as the J.D. Power CX team and three industry thought leaders provide best practices and actionable information you can apply to your business in the new work-at-home environment.

The topics they will discuss include:

*People Strategies -- How to hire and who to retain in the WAH environment

*WAH CX Strategies: To drive CX you need a meaningful work environment for agents

*Technology Strategies: Principles for ensuring your tech investments are maximized and flexible for whatever the future may hold

*WAH CX Strategies: Support, communication, and coaching best practices

*Strategic Outlook: What is likely to happen as the new normal sets in after the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic has lessened

The impact of COVID-19 has been felt across the customer service industry and led to unprecedented operational shifts. However, this is not the first time that businesses have been pushed to their limits, and it will not be the last.

In this webinar, we will look at what it takes to manage a customer service team, brand, and business through these uncertain times, and the unexpected tweaks you should be making.

Speakers include:
• Martin Lampman, Director, Customer Support Operations, BCLC
• Rami Sarabi, Executive Director, Global Customer Service, Tarte Cosmetics
• Natalie Dowle, Head of Americas, Customer Care, Financial Times
• Nicholas Zeisler, Principal, Zeisler Consulting

Learn how to maximize your team remotely with Workforce management (WFM). Watch this interview with our guest Justin Hurdle, Director of WFM & Operational Performance at Bill Gosling Outsourcing, for tips on how you can apply Workforce Management in your business to maximize productivity.

In this interview you will learn about:

*What Workforce Management is and what it can do for you
*How to keep a remote team and call queue running effectively
*The key factors in maintaining performance and meeting service levels

The COVID-19 crisis is reminding us of a business fundamental – communicating with consistency, clarity, and empathy is essential for a positive customer experience. While the unknown is making many customers understandably anxious, we are finding that fear and a shortage of facts are leading some company representatives to communicate inconsistent or inappropriate messaging.

Watch this brief audio blog as we discuss how to get our messaging right in these unprecedented times.

Traditional contact center quality programs typically include a team of experts who evaluate agent and business performance through calls, email, chat, and social media to ensure customer service excellence. These services provide the contact center management team with specific, targeted, and practical insights to drive improvements in agent performance and business processes.

Quality teams are commonly structured in a shared services function that serves as the right hand to contact center leaders. This allows them to maintain their objectivity and dedicate the resources required to consistently evaluate a statistically valid sample of interactions and continuously identify new call center monitoring standards, share best practices, evaluate trends, and prioritize action plans.

Join us as we discuss how to take quality programs to the next level.

Helping Your Contact Center Staff to Work Remotely Now

The benefits of a strong quality assurance program stretch far beyond the walls of the contact center, but in recent times of remote working, you may be struggling to assess agent performance and keep employees engaged.

As your brand’s voice on the front line, it’s imperative to find new and unique ways to keep your remote agents motivated to maintain performance and deliver quality customer care.

We will discuss the following on this webinar:

*Do I need to score more calls when my agents are working from home? *How can I make conversations personal over video?
*How can I make coaching as effective when not in person?
*Are there tools that can help me keep track of things more efficiently?

Customer service is more important than ever for driving loyalty and value for an organization, no matter the channel. Likewise, digital transformation of customer care is one of the most critical factors for improving customer experiences and long-term value for shareholders.

On this webinar, experts from UJET and Edify will look at the top customer service trends driving customer support in the age of discerning customers with high expectations who prefer to connect across multiple channels.

Join us and you will learn how to:

-- Meet customers where they are
-- Digitally transform the contact center
-- Pair intelligent bots with humans to improve the customer experience
-- Move beyond multichannel service to enable a full and frictionless omnichannel customer experience
-- Connect your contact center with the rest of your organization

With people in many cities and countries now being asked to work or learn from home, organizations are increasingly looking for options to make that work productive and secure.

During this session, AWS leaders will give you an overview and answer questions about six services you may find helpful, as well as share guidance on how you can get started quickly.

During this webinar we will discuss how to maximize virtual platforms for optimal performance and results. We will cover aspects of working virtually and how different parts of an organization can do this effectively. We will discuss when virtual venues are effective and when they are not, as well as some tips and tricks for using them.

During this "Remote Workforce Executive Briefing", David Reed, President of Remote Office Consulting, will discuss the following aspects of creating a remote workforce strategy:

*Preparation– Define what you can do right now to analyze your work tasks to determine what is critical to your organization and what can be put on hold. What work can be done remotely?

* Remote Workplace Approval– Define the critical elements that are necessary to support any work-from-home team member.

*Information Management – Identify how you will manage data and share information. How is critical data protected? How are backups performed?

*Supervision – Discuss how you move from managing on-site team members to leading a distributed workforce. Moving from clocking in to completing assigned tasks.

*Employee Productivity – Tips and advice to help a work from home employee maintain his/her productivity.

*Technology – Provide an overview of tools that can be used to collaborate within a remote workforce and manage the work being done.

*Culture – Discuss what can be done to maintain your corporate culture and sense of teamwork while dealing with a distributed workforce.

The Northridge Group’s Tina Suthers shares some best practices for effectively connecting with your employees in a work from home environment.

In his latest audio blog, Nathan Hart, Director of IT Services & Security at The Northridge Group, shares tips for effectively supporting a remote workforce and ensuring that your organization's technology and infrastructure are crisis-ready.

It’s pretty simple logic. A person in distress is in no position to help another person in distress. That’s why Sharpen has created a brand new type of contact center platform focused on improving the agent experience.

Spend 7 minutes with CCNG’s David Hadobas and Sharpen’s VP of Marketing, Murph Krajewski. They take a fresh look at what’s right and wrong with customer service, how things like agent attrition, omnichannel and remote working could be better, and how we can get there together. SPOILER ALERT: it’s not as hard as you might think.

Hiring challenges have grown over the years based upon a high demand for agents, sickness, turnover, attrition, the need to produce better results ... and on and on the list goes.

During this interview with Phil we will discuss the need to be smarter in our hiring process and how, if we take the time to explore a person's natural behavior (character traits), we are better able to fit the right person in the right position. This in turn has an impact on the back end and you will see reduced stress, employees who stay longer, improved customer satisfaction, and a reduction in overall costs.

What if your agents didn't have to "know" all of the answers for the questions your customers are asking? What if they could be productive in resolving customer issues from day one?

In this interview we talk to Greg DeVore from ScreenSteps about how you can better utilize knowledge base resources to:

*Decrease agent onboarding time
*Decrease time to productivity
*Decrease hold time
*Decrease handle time

We hear a lot about the dwindling importance of the voice channel. Yet, more often than not, we are actually seeing call volumes increase. So, how is the voice channel evolving? How are chatbots impacting the voice channel? Why are federal employment stats for call center agents growing?

Watch this brief 9-minute video where CCNG's David Hadobas and Shai Berger, CEO of Fonolo, offer expert insights into the voice channel, chatbots, and the changing nature of voice interactions.

Common challenges, mistakes and issues with marketing programs focused on delivering content around Cloud contact center and other Software as a Service solutions.