Customer expectations in APAC have changed. Can your contact centre adapt?

We’ve certainly learned much about customer and employee expectations in APAC during the past year. Massive shifts to remote work, combined with greater preferences for instantaneous response, have led APAC contact centres to accelerate their digital transformations. The process was arguably already happening—the pandemic just boosted it.

I had been involved in a lot of conversations with these contact centres prior to the pandemic about adopting new digital practices and focusing on employee experience to improve customer experience, but it was amazing how much resistance we received. Usually, the response I heard was “this is the way we have always done it” or “this change looks too difficult to manage.”

Our recent report on the State of the Contact Centre showed that the pandemic forced most contact centres to accept change and adopt new ways of working to survive. As we now enter the next phase (returning to something approaching normal), this now raised a new set of challenges for APAC CX leaders. How do we maximise on this change to enhance customer experience, improve employee culture and increase efficiency? Companies must base-line their current position, establish new targets, set new goals and KPI’s and implement new practices. Companies that do not embrace these changes—and slip back into old habits—will have a difficult time surviving in a post pandemic world.

One of the key adaptive areas for contact centre and CX leaders involves how they handle data to make decisions. Data-driven decision makers have always outperformed those driven by emotion or ‘feel’. New metrics and measurements need to be adopted, and modernised KPIs need to be accepted. Being data driven when pursuing change and planning for the future is the key to survival.

How can you collect that data? Moreover, how can you actually make sense of it? What are your customers and employees telling you?

It’s an incredibly complex process. Customers aren’t forgiving when feedback is ignored, and they want their problems fixed the first time. Customers want a simple solution—and contact centres want a simple way to provide it.

That’s what we aim to deliver with Calabrio ONE: simplicity and agility for your contact centre. We want to help you empower your workforce and build a culture of data driven decisions.

Empower a flexible workforce

As contact centres transition to remote workplaces, some employees have expressed a desire to work more, while others have certain times they cannot work. Some employees have or need more flexibility now that they are working from home, and you’ll need to address that. Granting autonomy to your workforce while still meeting the needs of the business can be a challenge.

• Calabrio ONE provides the tools that allow agents to self-manage, self-coach and have more autonomy in their schedule. This empowers and keeps them engaged, while still meeting business needs.

Develop a flexible workforce

Your employees may not be in the same building anymore, but you’ll still need to train and develop their skills. Using personalised, self-service dashboards within Calabrio ONE, you can quickly spot coaching opportunities and target training efforts to those that need it – whether it’s coaching around positive language or identifying technical expertise that needs further development.

• Voice-of-the-customer and voice-of- the-employee insights, such as AI-powered sentiment analysis and predictive evaluation scores, help target agent gap areas and identify agents in need of training. They also help determine what forms of training are needed based on interaction insights and patterns.

Manage a flexible workforce

No matter where your employees work, you need insight into how they are performing. Calabrio ONE WFM provides real-time adherence technology, which allows you to monitor agent adherence to schedules and compare with live ACD statuses. Anything out of adherence prompts an automated alarm. Interaction insights, live screen monitoring and desktop analytics from the rest of the Calabrio ONE suite allow you to then dig into the “why.”

• Calabrio WFM helps your organisation plan and manage its operations through advanced forecasting, dynamic scheduling, and intelligent automation.

Let data drive business-wide value

Whether your data lives in silos due to structural issues, or simply because your organisation’s growth has resulted in multiple, incompatible systems, you need to break down these barriers and end the headaches of patching together vendor-, vertical-, or data type-specific reporting products.

• Calabrio Advanced Reporting allows you to combine data streams from across the business. Connect systems from multiple vendors. Create a central view of all contact centre locations. Gain complete visibility into your omnichannel customer interactions to make better, more informed business decisions.

In each of these aspects, the key goal is simplification. You don’t need to spend time on manual monitoring processes, tedious data entry or scattered schedule management. You can spend more time providing customers with the level of service they now expect—and increase your contact centre’s influence on the wider organisation.

Have you felt the pull of shifting expectations? Do you need a simpler solution to address them? We’d love to help. Check out a demo of the new Calabrio ONE, and contact our APAC specialists for more information.

Peter Farnsworth

As Calabrio's Senior Regional Director for APAC, Peter is an experienced sales professional with an entrepreneurial approach and a proven track record for breaking new ground and executing “Go-To-Market” strategies in the Customer Experience Market. He is highly driven, results orientated with the ability to think strategically and execute seamlessly.