It’s been a whirlwind year in the conversation cloud. We’ve covered a lot in the last few months – so, before we rocket into the new year and a whole new frontier of innovation, we thought we’d recap some of our favourite topics from the Zailab blog from the last 11 months.
You ready? Let’s go.
1. We made a case for outbounding your inbound
Your agents spend most of their time taking calls. In fact, inbound voice calls account for the highest volumes in a contact center. You knew that already. But here’s the thing: taking the pressure off your inbound agents could be as simple as incorporating a little outbound flavour to the recipe. Want to read more? Here you go.
2. We unpacked the agent experience (AX)
Move aside, customer experience (CX). Well, sorta. Point is, you have to ensure your agents are happy before turning your attention to your customers. We spent a fair amount of time tackling this topic, and offered advice on creating agent personas to recruit the best people, identifying the touchpoints that affect them the most, and drawing up experience and journey maps to identify areas for improvement. Start your own AX journey here.
3. Say it with us: ommmmmmnichannel
We can’t say it enough: when someone calls into a contact centre, they’re probably already upset about something. It’s in everyone’s interest to make the process as painless as possible. Top tip: knowing your customer is absolutely key to getting omnichannel right. Our omnichannel series starts here.
4. Customers are important too
The buzzword of 2017. Drum roll… yes, yes, it’s CX. Simply put, this is the relationship your customer has with your business. If you’re in the contact centre trade, well yeah, CX is a big deal. Have you done everything you can to ensure you’re keeping your customers happy? After all, it’s this experience that frames their relationship with you.
5. Skills-based routing
One of our favourite articles involves a throwback to the beginnings of the humble ACD – then launches forward to the state of routing today. The gist? Skills-based routing is great and all, but there’s so much more a routing algorithm could be doing for us.
6. Creating the contact center of the future
In a first article in a series on the deep-learning algorithms set to rock the contact center, we described the amazing stuff you could be getting up to with generative adversarial networks. We’re talking voice recognition, query automation, knowledge augmentation and even data compression. A pipe dream? No.
Phew, talk about a whirlwind tour. This hardly covers everything we’ve written about on the Zailab blog this year, but time is money and we know you could probably do with a lot more of both.
Right?