During the Telia ACE Roadshow this past fall we asked the participants a number of curious questions about their focus areas and challenges. One topic that many find interesting is skills supply: How do you get your staff to stay and how do you attract people with the right personal qualities?
So what will make your customer facing staff thrive and feel happy at work?
57 percent said that the contact center staff want to be able to work remotely, 54 percent that flexible schedules are important and 52 percent that interesting tasks are important to enjoy work.
If the employers deliver on their employees wishes? The answer to that question is “not quite”.
37 percent say that they offer, or are in the process of making it possible, for their employees to work flexibly and/or remotely. 35 percent say that they are exploring the possibility of creating new career paths in the contact center, and 34 percent that they are planning on implementing smart tools to make the workday simpler and less repetitive.
In other words, there is a gap between what the employees want and what the employers provide. To attract and keep the talents of the future it is a good idea to close the gap as soon as possible, by for example implementing tools and solutions that make it possible to work remotely and that make the workday more mobile and flexible.
If you aren’t already familiar with our app ACE to Go we suggest that you get up to speed by reading this blog post.
Reinventing the contact center experience with AI
Of those who answered the survey, just 3 percent stated that attracting and retaining staff is one of the goals with their AI implementation. But AI technology can in fact contribute in several ways to make the contact center staff thrive and stay longer.
Partly via self-service solutions and robotization for simple and repetitive tasks, which allow the staff to spend their time on more stimulating assignments. It also creates new career paths and roles, such as chatbot coach and robotization expert, as well as writer and content editor for the smart knowledgebase. Check out this blog post to read about the Swedish trade union Byggnads successful automation journey.
By using AI to work in a more structured way with analysis of data, the door also opens to roles in the fields of analysis and quality- and business development. You get new and new roles for the employees, at the same time as the contact center becomes a source of insights that create value for the entire organization. That means reinventing customer service with AI at the same time as you reinvent the contact center as a place to work.
Want to read the full Customer Meeting Insights 2023? You find it here!
