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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.

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.

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.

How should you incentivize call center agents to show up, work productively and stay with the company? Some think bigger paychecks will do the trick, but a recent study by Earnest found that money may not be the most important incentive. More than 40% of respondents would trade a tenth of their salary for more flexibility in their schedules. Others think that team competitions, reward raffles, walks-of-fame, and monthly barbeques will motivate agents and keep them happy.

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.

While the entire world goes into shutdown due to the Corona pandemic, it would be easy to forget about the ongoing privacy concerns that the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has thrown up in recent months.

With contact centre BPOs around the globe migrating from on-premise to cloud technology, competitive organisations are left asking: is my BPO next? On-premise or single-tenant hosted contact centre BPOs are making the move to cloud; whether the result of an organisation-wide initiative, the desire to scale, a move towards centralisation, feature limitations or for a variety of other business reasons. But what motivations lie at the core of this migration to cloud? What’s to gain from moving to the cloud?