Uncertainty can get the best of any business, of any size and in any industry. You can’t apply another business’s playbook for 2020, verbatim, to your own business. Instead, you have to take a customized approach based on your business goals, customers, and processes.
Every business has strengths and weaknesses. Performance results will ultimately determine how your business will work in the “new normal.” Know whether you’re a growing, static, or shrinking enterprise to plan for the future accordingly.
Growing enterprises
Growing businesses are actively increasing agent headcount and other resources. They want to use their resources more effectively to power growth — and the faster, the better.
If your business is spending more money and hiring more employees, you’ll benefit from a framework that fits your goals.
Growing businesses from improvements like:
- AI and machine learning: These tools empower your contact center agents with real-time decision making skills, thanks to automatically-populated fields and context. Chatbots and voice authentication are popular use cases for this technology, as well as more advanced options like RPA and auto-categorization.
- Chatbots: You’re scaling your workforce right now. You might not have enough agents to handle all customer inquiries. As you grow your workforce, use chatbots to boost customer satisfaction while optimizing agents’ time.
- 100% monitoring: If you want to grow, you need to understand your customer pain points. At this stage, it’s critical to record and learn from all of your customer interactions. Your business can use this monitoring to plan its growth.
- Predictive analytics: You’re collecting data, so put it to good use. Growing businesses focus on proactive customer interactions and give more context to each customer touchpoint.
Growing enterprises can look forward to quick wins and iteration on a very fast timetable. Take on a customized approach to your contact center that empowers your organization for fast growth.
Static enterprises
Not every organization is in the position to invest time and money into growth. Static enterprises want to get more results and a stronger ROI at the same level of resources. These businesses want to continue to grow profitability without increasing their budget.
In this situation, your organization might benefit more from:
- Segmenting customer interactions: You can’t look at every customer touchpoint, especially as you grow. Instead, segment your customer interactions and analyze the ones that are most meaningful to your brand. Maybe that means retaining customers above a certain LTV or speeding up the first-time buyer experience.
- Migrate lower-value customers: Lower-value customers eat into a business’s ROI when they use high-investment channels, like voice calls. If possible, migrate these customers to digital-first strategies. An online FAQ, email, or chatbot gives customers the help they need while preserving agent resources.
- Coaching agents: You’re making do with the same level of resources, so you can’t afford to hire new agents. Instead, increase the value and skills of the agents you currently have. Give productive, results-focused coaching to your team of agents on a regular basis.
In an uncertain world, many businesses aren’t comfortable investing more in growth, and we understand that. Fortunately, you can still make the best of an uncertain situation as a static enterprise with the right investments.
Shrinking enterprises
The third type of business is a shrinking enterprise. Your organization may fall into this category if you’re decreasing headcounts, narrowing your budget and down-scaling other resources at your contact center.
This isn’t necessarily about cost savings, but learning how to do more with fewer resources. Shrinking organizations have a huge task ahead of them: while it’s possible to do more with less, they have to go all-in on digital to see results.
This means customizing your approach to:
- Find customer pain points: Check your website analytics to see what common keywords or questions customers type into your site. You can proactively address these issues with website content, a chatbot, or with different live agent workflows.
- Use workforce management: Your workforce is shrinking, and that means there’s a razor-thin margin of error when it comes to staffing. Your business should invest in WFM software that uses AI to auto-schedule agents in the most cost-effective way without sacrificing customer satisfaction.
- Offer customer self-service: Offer a complete, end-to-end self-service portal online to minimize your agents’ workload. FAQs, setup wizards, and other self-service options make the most of your limited personnel resources.
- Switch to the cloud: It’s nearly impossible to do more with less if you don’t have the right technology. Shrinking businesses have to invest in cloud tech like CXone that get ROI. According to Forrester, businesses saw a 323% average annual ROI on CXone, which made it a valuable part of their revenue growth strategy.
It may not be easy doing more with less, but it’s possible. And with the right contact center software like NICE CXone, there’s much potential no matter your organization’s size. Regardless of where your company is today, remember that you should customize your approach. Uncertainty is scary for any business, but a personalized approach will put you far ahead of the competition in 2020 and beyond.
