As transactions increasingly shift from physical, ‘bricks and mortar’ stores to online environments, the contact center agent often becomes the first person a customer interacts with. They serve as an essential bridge connecting customers and brands, and play a crucial role in shaping the customer experience (CX).
The challenges
However, all contact centers need to carefully navigate a complex web of existing and emerging challenges. From ever-increasing customer expectations and omnichannel requirements to rapidly evolving technologies and greater security requirements, the landscape is rife with obstacles that demand innovative solutions. In order to comprehensively understand these challenges and overcome them, organizations need to be willing to invest in robust, trustworthy and accurate contact center and call center testing solutions. Some of the many challenges faced by contact centers are highlighted below.
1. Customer expectations and omnichannel integration
Today’s customers have increasingly growing expectations for prompt, efficient, reliable and personalized support. They expect to be able to engage via their preferred channel and at a time that best suits their needs, not the businesses.
Additionally, a seamless experience across all interaction channels is now a baseline expectation for consumers. This requires contact centers to ensure that they have robust omnichannel integration and that engagements across each are tracked and recorded. This information and context needs to then be connected and directly available to all agents or even artificial intelligence (AI) software which may require it to understand purchase information, relevant context and any previous interactions.
2. Technology
The swift pace of technological change in the industry consistently challenges contact centers. While this technological evolution offers many benefits, implementing and maintaining systems requires continuous adaptation and investment. Much of this acceleration is being shaped by advancements in AI and automation.
While AI-driven technologies like chatbots and virtual assistants have the potential to enhance operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness, their successful implementation requires thorough preparation. The outcomes of introducing any new technologies should be carefully and continually monitored to ensure they are having the desired impacts, for example enhancing the CX rather than frustrating customers. Due to the interconnected nature of contact centers, testing and performance monitoring should be continuous, as just a single change or update to any system has the potential to have adverse impacts on a multitude of other systems.
3. Talent management
Global contact centers routinely grapple with the recruitment, training, and the retention of highly-skilled customer service representatives. Contact centers typically struggle with high rates of labor turnover and this leads to ‘brain drain’ or knowledge loss, as well as increased costs and resource usage due to the need to undertake further recruitment and training.
As well as this, contact center agents are now increasingly demanding that they be allowed to work remotely. This can lead to some challenges regarding collaboration and productivity, but more commonly it has been seen to have a multitude of benefits for organizations, including the ability to recruit from anywhere in the world. This is especially helpful in cases where global language skills are required for particular companies and customer service roles.
4. Data security
Contact centers today handle vast amounts of customer data, some of which may be sensitive in nature. Unfortunately, this can make them a target for cyberattacks. Ensuring data security and compliance with privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the minimum expected of contact centers today. However, many will choose to employ much more stringent data security and control measures to further enhance their security and protect customers’ data.
In addition, individual countries and even regions will have different regulations governing customer interactions and the handling of data. Organizations must ensure that they are compliant at all times with the regulations relevant to their specific operating environment.
5. Process improvements
Monitoring, analyzing and understanding metrics like first-call resolution, average handling time, and customer satisfaction are crucial for improving future performance. Yet, for many organizations, just determining which metrics to prioritize and measure can pose a substantial challenge.
Performance and customer experience testing
Performance (or load) testing and customer experience testing are just two of the test types that play an invaluable role in maintaining a high standard of service in contact centers. By identifying and addressing potential issues, optimizing resources, and enhancing the CX, contact centers can more effectively meet customer expectations and contribute to the overall success of the business. Some of the key benefits of performance and customer experience testing include:
- Identifying weak points: Performance testing involves replicating diverse call and interaction volumes to evaluate the contact center system’s capacity. This helps to identify any potential bottlenecks and weaknesses in the infrastructure, for example, network limitations, hardware issues, or software problems. Through identifying these at an early stage, the contact center can take corrective actions to prevent customer-impacting disruptions. It also helps to ensure system reliability.
- Optimizing resource allocation: Performance testing provides insights into how well the contact center’s resources, such as the agents, systems and technology are utilized under different scenarios and considerations. This allows for more effective allocation of resources, ensuring that the right number of agents are available to handle calls and other interactions without overburdening or underutilizing staff.
- Enhancing scalability: At peak times, and occasionally unexpectedly, the contact center will need to very quickly scale up their infrastructure to accommodate growing contact volumes. Performance testing assists in evaluating whether the existing infrastructure and IT capabilities can effectively handle this surge in demand.
- Improving response times: Performance testing can accurately assess the speed and responsiveness of the contact center’s systems. This is crucial for providing a seamless and positive CX, as slow response times are likely to lead to frustrated customers and reduced CX.
- Enhancing CX: Customer experience testing involves comprehensively analyzing customer interactions to evaluate the quality of service provided. This includes assessing how well agents handle inquiries, whether issues are resolved to a high-standard, and how effectively agents utilize provided scripts and/or any available knowledge bases.
- Optimizing processes: Customer experience testing gives insights into the efficiency of contact center processes. By analyzing customer interactions, the contact center can more easily identify opportunities to streamline workflows, reduce call handling times, and improve the overall efficiency of operations.
- Providing data-driven decisions: Regular and reliable testing generates data that can be analyzed to make informed decisions about system upgrades, process improvements, resource allocation, and training initiatives. This data-driven approach enhances the contact center’s ability to make strategic decisions aligned with business goals.
The Cyara Platform is the only automated CX assurance solution that offers complete visibility and control over your entire CX journey on every channel. This includes everything from pre-production visualization of your IVR and chatbot customer journeys to post-production and live monitoring of voice quality. So why not contact us today to find out even more about the right contact center testing solutions for you.