Across the board, workforce participation remains below pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1.7 million Americans are missing from the workforce, as compared to February 2020.
In the face of rising labor shortages and expenses, it’s no surprise that according to our “State of the Digital Customer Experience 2024” report, 66% of organizations expect to increase investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. They are doing so to meet their goals of helping to maximize their customer engagement workforce and elevate the customer experience (CX).
Prioritizing the agent experience is key to ensuring exceptional CX. Employees who feel valued and satisfied in their roles are more likely to go the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction.
We are in an exciting time where AI-powered tools and bots are reshaping workforce management (WFM) through purposeful automation to improve the agent experience and empower the delivery of high-quality CXs with the added benefit of cost containment.
The Scheduling Struggle is Real
Contact center agents deal with a high volume and variety of calls and interaction types requiring extensive knowledge about products or services and must be able to adapt quickly to different situations.
Many contact centers operate 24/7, requiring agents to work shifts during irregular hours, including weekends and holidays; this can be challenging from a work-life balance perspective.
Scheduling bots leveraging AI are quickly becoming a game-changer for unlimited employee schedule flexibility.
One of the most significant opportunities for improving the agent experience is flexible scheduling. Yet contact centers are challenged to offer the flexibility employees demand. Fixed shift work is fundamentally at odds with what employees want. This may be why absenteeism and attrition have remained stubbornly high for 30 years.
Shift-bidding alone is no longer a viable solution. And businesses cannot hire enough WFM resources to manually adjust schedules to provide the required flexibility.
Scheduling bots leveraging AI are quickly becoming a game-changer for unlimited employee schedule flexibility. These bots make it possible to balance the scheduling needs of the organization with the needs of the employees.
The business impact is substantial, as are the options for schedule flexibility and agent autonomy.
To illustrate, a leading insurance company was able to save $2,000 per agent per year on average, including a 30% reduction in agent attrition and 23% reduction in agent absenteeism.
And in addition to the more than $300,000 annual savings the company achieved, a 32-point increase in employee Net Promoter Score (NPS) also resulted.
The “Uberization” of WFM
The shifts we are seeing in the contact center mirror the flexible scheduling we are seeing in other sectors.
For example, rideshare vendor Uber uses a combination of algorithms and pricing strategies to determine the fare for each ride, aiming to balance supply and demand while providing a competitive rate for both riders and drivers. Uber drivers also have the flexibility to choose their own working hours without needing explicit approval from a manager.
By eliminating the need for shift and schedule management, businesses empower their agents to have control over their work hours.
Contact centers now have an opportunity to use this same approach to WFM via AI-infused bots that can automatically calculate the impact of shift changes based on forecasted volumes, capacity, and performance. With AI applied to WFM forecasting, agents can make autonomous scheduling changes without manager involvement or approval.
Incentives and gamification are other elements of this approach. For example, giving each 15-minute increment of the schedule a “value,” and agents are given “currency” to spend or earn points when making schedule changes.
In this scenario, an agent can choose to leave work early in exchange for using or earning points by offering not to work a shift when it’s forecasted to be slow.
For example, employees can earn points when they make a change that is beneficial to the company, like choosing to work an interval for which the company is understaffed. Employees can then opt to spend those points to make changes to their schedule as needed.
These calculations are made in real-time, so as employees make changes, the model stays current. If employees maintain a positive points balance and don’t change the total number of hours they are working, they can make unlimited changes to align their schedules to meet their needs.
By eliminating the need for shift and schedule management, businesses empower their agents to have control over their work hours. This frees managers to focus on more critical aspects of customer support, such as coaching for quality and for compliance assurance.
Managers will then have more time to offer valuable guidance and support to agents, helping them improve their performance, enhance their customer service skills, and navigate any challenges they may face on the job. Ultimately, this shift in focus can lead to more efficient and effective customer support operations.
Coaching Bots Improve Real-Time Guidance
Behind every happy employee is a supervisor equipped with AI-driven tools like coaching bots to drive continuous improvement in CX, compliance, and revenues, while ensuring every agent is performing at the top of their game.
For example, when customer service interactions involve negative sentiments, escalations, long silences, or multiple interruptions, real-time agent assist tools provide AI-driven, real-time guidance based on acoustic (nonverbal), linguistic (verbal), and desktop activity to employees working from anywhere.
Knowledge articles are surfaced to support timely and accurate responses to queries while also reducing cognitive overload for agents.
Despite the perception that bots could eventually replace humans, agents...have a huge ally in AI-powered bots.
In addition, these bots evaluate calls, identify non-compliance, and assign coaching for 100% of voice and text interactions. Generative AI-powered scoring models enable them to extend beyond compliance or “script” scoring and accurately evaluate abstract concepts like agent empathy to ensure customers receive the best outcomes and experiences.
These real-time coaching tools provide immediate feedback on calls or interactions, helping agents correct mistakes or improve performance in the moment. Agents hone their skills more rapidly by learning from mistakes as they happen and receiving guidance on how to handle similar situations better in the future.
In addition, real-time coaching tools support quality assurance, ensuring agents follow company protocols and provide consistent service. Done right, they deliver the support agents want and need without business disruption. These tools are designed to guide only the agents who need it, elevating agent performance in specific targeted areas.
Moreover, coaching bots leveraging Conversational AI have the unique ability to listen to conversations in real time and use AI to notify and assist employees and supervisors in ways to handle a call more effectively. As a best practice, coaching bots that are trained on a business’s specific interaction and agent data become smarter and more effective over time.
By delivering focused guidance to agents who may be struggling, we have seen organizations achieve significant results, including:
- A 20-second reduction in call duration per transaction.
- A 10% improvement in sales conversion.
- A 10% improvement in retaining at-risk customers.
- 100% adherence with compliance standards.
And a 20% improvement in CSAT/NPS.
Allies in Providing a Competitive Differentiator
Despite the perception that bots could eventually replace humans, agents in today’s contact center workforce have a huge ally in AI-powered bots.
These advanced solutions help companies prioritize employee wellbeing by reducing cognitive overload and simplifying complexity while increasing agent productivity and contact center capacity through CX automation.
By providing a compelling agent experience, they can be a powerful competitive differentiator in today’s marketplace.