The Enterprise Connect conference is one of the largest events in communications technology. It’s often the venue for major announcements from the biggest vendors. It was here that Twilio announced Flex. It was here that Avaya announced Breeze, SnappIns, and Zang. It was here that Amazon launched Connect.
Big announcements this year include the launch of two new cloud contact centers called Edify and Thrio; a new contact center from Vonage called CX Cloud Express (based on their acquisition of NVM which we covered here); and the rebranding of Polycom/Plantronics as “Poly.”
But as for the big call center vendors, their announcements were less dramatic, and all revolved around AI.
Utility companies provide people with critical and valuable services: Heat, hydro, and other essentials that consumers have come to rely on. Given the increasing number of customers they must support, these companies would certainly benefit from implementing strong customer service offerings. Poor customer service and disorganized call centers can not only be frustrating for consumers, but also have a negative impact on the company’s revenue, customer retention, and business acquisition.
When I first stepped foot into the Fonolo office nearly a year ago, I was also knowingly dipping my toes into the customer service ecology. With the abundance of experts, thought leaders, Twitter handles, and publications that make up the DNA of both the customer service and customer experience industries, it quickly became clear that the learning curve would be steep. Luckily, though, there exist a host of organizations whose resources caught me up to speed in fairly short order.
Customer service is a difficult job at the best of times. However, when your customers are patients, the dynamic becomes all the more challenging. Dealing with patients who are in crisis or pain, and on top of that, are emotionally drained, can create increasingly sensitive scenarios for call center agents to handle.
The cloud has radically transformed the call center industry. The shift, now firmly in its second decade, is accepted as conventional wisdom. You rarely find people arguing the merits of premise-based call centers. But there’s no denying the fact that many premise-based systems are still sold and deployed, especially for larger call centers. It seems companies are fearful of touting any non-cloud successes because the knee-jerk reaction is to label that as anti-progress.
Have you encouraged a frustrated employee to stay positive after a particularly deflating customer interaction? If you have, you were tacitly acknowledging the importance of positivity in customer service.
For most call centers, service level is a very important KPI.![Demystifying AI and NLP [Slideshare]](https://fonolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Demystifying-AI-and-NLP-Live-Discussion-200x200.jpg)
