A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN AGENT IN 2024
RELIABILITY
CHART 1 SOURCE : BANDWIDTH
BECOME YOUR AGENTS ’ LONG-TERM CAREER PLAN
Let ’ s deeper-dive into the agent experience . Cutting spam calls helps keep agents around . Call verification filters make a huge difference . They improve agents ’ tickets-per-day metrics , and they make for a more pleasant workday .
Similarly , smart call routing benefits customers but also employees . You can ’ t blame customers for being frustrated when they ’ ve been stuck in IVR menus , circling through dead-ends , or worst of all , getting disconnected and having to redial . Agents perform best when they get the right customers on the line , and those customers are in the right frame of mind .
40 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
AGENTS PERFORM BEST WHEN THEY GET THE RIGHT CUSTOMERS ON THE LINE , AND THOSE CUSTOMERS ARE IN THE RIGHT FRAME OF MIND .
Finally , and let ’ s face it , employees , like agents , do typically prefer to workfrom-home ( WFH ). Can you blame them ? WFH eliminates the costly , draining , time-consuming , and risky commutes , both from accidents and dangerous disease exposures , but also from attacks like in parking lots and transit stops for those on evening and night shifts .
It used to be a hassle to set up agents to WFH . Then JetBlue proved the model with its WFH agents in Utah .
Not only did creating these flexible jobs benefit hard-working employees who needed them , it was a great boon to the company , increasing agent productivity by 25 %. And that was 20 years ago : before the advent of today ’ s ad-
vanced cloud-based systems , boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic WFH experience .
Now there ’ s no excuse for maintaining a rigid , in-office contact center workforce . Contact centers can harness best CCaaS providers while tapping specialty tools like artificial intelligence ( AI ) and machine learning ( also SEE CHART 1 ).
ARE YOU READY FOR CHANGE ?
Running a successful contact center used to be about staffing phones , cutting call time , and reducing time to resolution . Those are still important , but there ’ s a new trifecta of requirements that goes further .
When you stack the value of a great agent experience on top of secure systems and a redundant network , you achieve true reliability . The kind of reliability that catapults your contact center to the forefront of brand preservation : and turns the contact center into a value-creator for the entire enterprise .
Ankush Gangwani is the GM of Enterprise Business and Global CPAAS at Bandwidth , where he builds cloud platforms that help global enterprises improve customer experience and increase resiliency at a lower cost . His team ’ s most recent creation , Maestro™ , won the Best of Enterprise Connect award .