Strategic Contact, an independent contact center consulting firm, recently published the results and analysis of its annual survey of close to 300 participants across multiple lines of business, industries and various contact center sizes. This study not only shows the results for 2019, but compares the results to previous years. Interestingly, there is somewhat of a mismatch between what vendors are hyping (like AI) and what various industries actually are reporting as their top priorities.
2019 shows a shift in top challenges, which has been pretty consistent in past years and mainly centered around coaching and training. This year, technology and frontline staffing issues dominate the top challenges in this survey.
In terms of priorities for 2019, performance management technology has moved up the ladder, and employee engagement has leapfrogged other priorities to the top spot. However, self-service continues to be high on the list for many industries in 2019, with 21.7% of respondents placing this as a top priority.
So why does self-service continue to be a top priority in 2019? As the paper points out it is a key way to solve the dilemma companies continue to face: how to provide excellent, cost-effective service while facing other pressures such as outdated tools and staffing challenges.
As most would agree, self-service is a critical part of an effective customer engagement strategy. It is often the first contact customers have, and can either help to retain life-long customers, or cut short relationships if they have a less-than-optimal experience.
If you haven't revisited your self-service strategy recently, 2019 may be your year to improve your customers' experience quickly and cost-effectively, while allowing you also focus on other business priorities. With the right combination of experience and technology, Streamwrite and ATI are ready to help modernize your self-service.
The Contact Center Challenges and Priorities 2019 report can be viewed here: https://www.strategiccontact.com/articles/2019/CC-Challenges-Priorities-Jan2019.pdf
One of the items that we struggled with for years was getting the right information properly documented into the hands of the Portals administrative users who need it. This is because we have a variety of applications that run on Portals, all with different administrative requirements. When you look at some specific application needs you can see where these differences come in:
- Payment IVR
- Payment reports
- Control of processing fees, if applicable
- Payment review items
- Jury Interfaces
- Jury IVR / IWR / SMS reports
- Hours of operation for multiple sites and phone vs walk in hours
- Notification controls
- Screen Pop Applications
- Access to and use of Portals Pop
- VCourt Remote Appearances
- VCourt reports
- Event fee management
- Rescheduling attendees
This list goes on and on. What I am getting at is that with every different Portals application there can be extensively differing instructions on how to manage and use the application. For this reason we created a dynamic help system for Portals App Manager Users.
This system creates, on the fly, when the user clicks download help in Portals App Manager, a PDF help file that is specific not only to the application being managed but also to that user's specific permissions.
If for example, you have a user that can only pull reports and make recordings, Portals Dynamic Help System will produce a help file with only those specific instructions as opposed to a full system admin who will receive a help file with all functions.
The PDF file produced is automatically displayed on modern browsers but can be downloaded for future reference.
The Portals Dynamic Help System streamlines access to the information Portals administrative users need.