TALKING

It is critical the tools enabling employees to work from anywhere are suited to the requirements of the digital economy and a dispersed , flexible workforce . replace them . This is profoundly changing the way contact centers work , creating a hybrid workforce of AI-assisted agents .

Let ’ s be clear : voice is not going away . As agent work is becoming more complex and sophisticated with digital self-service handling simpler queries , AI is providing immeasurable benefits to agents handling the complicated tasks . environment . This presented a number of operational challenges , particularly in relation to contact center staff : How do you meet ? How do you manage staff who have never worked from home ? How do you escalate a customer query ?

And this comes largely thanks to advances in voice recognition .

A few years ago , the speech searches on Google Assistant were extremely simple . Now , they ’ re full conversational sentences .

Traditional collaboration tools allocated to non-customer facing staff have typically been used for rudimentary video conference and chat functions . But these tools can be extremely powerful for frontline staff .

Consider access to supervisors . When you ’ re in a contact center , you can raise your hand when you ’ ve got a tricky problem and the supervisor will help you out . When working remotely , this becomes difficult . An agent waiting in a queue to chat with a supervisor costs a lot of money and has a huge impact on the wait time and customer experience . Instead , collaboration tools allow agents to view the presence of the supervisor , enable direct chat , or ways to provide learning through shared posts and documents that can be searched and found instantly . These abilities have immense benefits for training and upskilling as businesses ensure all staff are up-to-date with ever-changing policies and procedures . Further , having a simple virtual location that ’ s team-based and imitates the office environment is key to ensuring agents navigate the blurred boundaries between home and office .

Melding together humans and technology

As AI continues to proliferate , it ’ s increasingly becoming a tool to assist humans in their work – not

IVR has existed in the contact center space for years , but it always left a lot to be desired . Today , it ’ s living up to its potential . These tools , like Google Voice Assistant and Google Cloud ’ s Artificial Intelligence platform , completely redefine both the customer and employee experience .

For example , while the customer and agent talk , the conversation is transcribed in real time . Google Voice Assistant analyzes it , understands the intent , adjusts to that conversation and pushes recommendations to the agent for how to respond to the customer ’ s inquiry .

This synthesis of AI knowledge and human empathy is creating ‘ super agents ’ who always have the relevant information at hand .

Even though we have been living with the pandemic for several months , many organizations are still figuring out the intricate and complex demands of their teams .

Only 37 % of businesses in Asia-Pacific had plans in place to get through a crisis like COVID-19 ; now that we ’ ve seen work-life integration en masse , it is critical the tools enabling employees to work from anywhere are suited to the requirements of the digital economy and a dispersed , flexible workforce . p

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