Maintaining Momentum through the Summer: Leveraging AI to Preserve Work Efficiency During Summer's Peak Vacation Period
In today's fast-paced business world, contact centres are under increasing pressure to provide top-notch customer service, especially during peak periods and holidays when staffing can be a challenge. However, a recent survey by McKinsey reveals that AI-powered solutions could be the answer to this problem.
AI is already widely used by 71% of organisations in at least one business function, and its adoption in contact centres during staff shortages, such as holidays, offers several key benefits.
Improving Job Satisfaction and Employee Retention
By automating routine tasks and providing real-time agent assistance, AI helps agents manage their work more effectively, reducing manual administrative tasks and increasing control over their work. This, in turn, improves job satisfaction and employee retention.
Maintaining Steady Service Levels
AI can help manage remote workers effectively, ensuring that service levels remain steady even with the shift towards remote and hybrid work preferences. This is crucial during holidays when contact centres cannot afford to be understaffed.
Reducing After-Call Work and Mental Load
AI can automate tasks such as generating call transcripts, summaries, and providing quick access to verified information, thus reducing after-call work and mental load for agents. This leads to faster and more accurate responses, reducing delays and improving productivity.
Decreasing Multitasking Stress
AI can integrate multiple communication channels into one interface and smartly route calls based on urgency and agent skills. This helps decrease multitasking stress for agents, making their work more manageable.
Enhancing Accuracy and Compliance
AI can alert agents to risks, mistakes, and privacy rules during calls, thus lowering the risk of costly errors. This is particularly important in regulated environments where compliance is paramount.
Supporting Supervisors and Managers
AI provides real-time dashboards and insights to supervisors and managers, enabling them to make better staffing and workflow adjustments. This allows supervisors to focus more on coaching and less on administrative duties.
In essence, McKinsey highlights that AI adoption in contact centres helps overcome staffing shortages by increasing efficiency, reducing workload and stress on agents, improving service quality, and enabling smarter workforce management. This is especially valuable during periods like holidays when staffing is limited.
Moreover, AI can help contact centres bridge operational gaps and strengthen resilience when resources are limited. It can relieve pressure on frontline teams by managing tier-1 queries around the clock, allowing human agents to focus on complex interactions. AI-powered knowledge assistants provide real-time, context-aware support to agents, reducing delays and improving productivity.
Furthermore, AI can help agents deliver more personalised service, anticipate needs, offer relevant solutions, and build stronger relationships with customers. In the words of Jurgen Hekkink, the Head of Product Marketing at AnywhereNow, AI acts as a strategic co-pilot, supporting continuity and boosting productivity in contact centres.
As we move forward, it is clear that AI will play an increasingly important role in contact centres, particularly during staff shortages. By embracing AI, contact centres can provide better service, improve efficiency, and create a more positive work environment for their agents.
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