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Contact center agents truly work on the front lines of customer service. They are frequently an upset customer’s first point of contact, and that first interaction can set the tone for brand perception over the long term. Ensuring that each of these scenarios is up to the quality your brand needs is crucial both for customer loyalty and the happiness of your agents. Performance management is an important way to meet the needs of both internal and external audiences.

People today are more connected, digitally, than ever before. Digitalization and technological advancements have fueled the adoption of connected devices, which are expected to reach nearly 31 billion units by 2024.

Over a year in to the COVID-19 pandemic, more people are working from home than ever before. Remote work was far from the norm before the pandemic—about 4.7 million U.S. employees, or about 17% of the workforce, worked from home full-time (more than five days a week). By spring of 2021, however, that number had increased to 44%. As experts at McKinsey wrote: “The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place.”

Employee engagement is the new buzz-phrase for organizations. Everybody wants the benefits of employee engagement, but many are going about it the wrong way. By its nature, “engagement” connotes a two-way relationship. The question is what comes first? It’s a bit like the old chicken or egg conundrum. Do we expect employees to engage with the organization or do we expect the organization to engage with employees?

When it comes to employee engagement, the research and survey data consistently find that engaged employees perform better, churn less, and are happier at work. That’s not surprising. The tricky part is knowing how to foster engagement such that employees are motivated, personally invested in their work, and committed to their own success and the success of the business.

Organizations can train and incentivize employees until the cows come home and still not achieve the performance goals they desire. Furthermore, employees may be trying their best to meet KPI goals and receive the promised rewards, yet they still fall short and are not sure how or what to change. In situations like these, performance coaching can make all the difference.

Voice Identification, also known as voice recognition or speaker recognition, is a biometric technology that is being adopted by call centers that must authenticate each caller before they can provide service. Voice identification uses the innate biological characteristics of a person’s voice to create a voiceprint that is unique to that person. Its biometric properties make voice identification difficult to spoof. It’s also easier for users who no longer need to remember passwords or the answers to security questions. With voice identification, there is nothing to forget or lose. The authentication is part of the person.