12 Days of Holiday Contact Centers

♪Oh, the weather outside is frightful♪… and so are the wait times for customers in the contact center! The snow has started falling and decorations are popping up in storefronts around town. This can mean only one thing…’tis the season for e-commerce mayhem! With customers choosing to do their shopping online instead of braving the crowds of shoppers, the human element of shopping at a brick-and-mortar store has largely disappeared. Speaking with a contact center agent might be the only time a customer ever deals with a real person, replacing the traditional salesperson and customer service interactions. CXone makes sure that these experiences remain genuine and personalized no matter which channel they are on.

In the United States, it’s widely celebrated to shop ‘til you drop, with holiday spending routinely topping $120 billion in e-commerce alone. Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Super Saturday, delivery truck drivers are busier than Santa’s reindeer. The same can be true for contact center agents.

The spike in shopping—both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar—goes hand-in-hand with a spike in contact center call volumes. Even after the holiday season has ended, the calls regarding returns, replacements, lost receipts and other inquiries will persist for weeks. For retailers of all sizes, CXone offers solutions that will increase productivity and keep up with the increased call volume while still providing a personalized experience for the customer.

Empower Agents

For agents, the approach of the holiday season has usually been met with a stressful realization that calls are going to come back-to-back-to-back. Seasonal contract jobs around the holiday season are a great solution for some departments but can be difficult for contact centers. With this volatile demand for work and the logistical headaches that accompany it, CXone can streamline staffing, agent training, and scheduling into quick and easy solutions. Predictive analytics from CXone’s 46 different algorithms will give supervisors the foresight to staff accordingly, ensuring that SLAs are met without having too many agents on staff. At the same time, you can make sure that centers aren’t understaffed, leaving agents on the verge of a meltdown.

With a user-friendly interface, managers don’t need the experience of multiple busy seasons to forecast what their contact centers can expect. Workforce Management allows managers to pivot their teams on a dime, intraday and near-term. If CXone’s forecasting AI technology signals that hiring new contractors for the busy season is a good idea, training those agents has become significantly easier. Thanks to contact center and call interaction analytics, customer surveys, and over 90 pre-built reports, the training resources available through CXone help you onboard informed and productive agents in half the time.

Even when a real human voice is required, robot assistance is ever-present. CXone balances the need for robot and human help perfectly. Each contact center agent is paired with an AI bot to assist them with automation in real-time. Named NEVA (NICE Employee Virtual Attendant), the bot provides agents with personalized guidance for each customer profile based on their history and offers advice for their next best action.

For retail companies, most calls around the holidays will fall into one of a few categories. By analyzing customer data, CXone AI will determine what a given customer is calling about based on their purchase history and other relevant factors. Customer insights like these are yet another way that CXone ensures customers feel valued by empowering your agents to provide a personalized support experience.

This automation can be massive for agent efficiency as well as for customer experience. Being put on hold is one thing, but being put on hold when you only have a small problem is even more frustrating. This is just one of the many areas where AI and service bots can be extremely helpful. If possible, most customers prefer to solve their contact center issue on their own. For questions regarding returns, exchanges, warranties and the like, chatbot and automated services free up agents for calls that need the human element. Across all channels, prompt services and chatbots allow customers to input information and get the directions they need to carry out simple tasks.

Single Source of Truth

During the chaos of the holiday season, or any spike in contact center volume, arming agents with information from a unified source becomes essential to delivering consistent experiences. Consolidating customer data and contact center controls into one interface will ensure that agents are gathering information and being made aware of updates, promotions, and inventory forecasts in real-time.

As a result of sifting through the customer data, CXone’s Automation Finder can pinpoint exactly what processes can be automated for greater productivity and agents can choose whether or not to automate the suggested processes in just one click.

Additionally, the Robotic Process Automation journey is a meticulous learning journey for AI that improves agent productivity and personalization. The automation studio gives the user the power to develop sophisticated attended and unattended automation processes manually while also patrolling for other opportunities that CXone will suggest.

Scale in the cloud

So what about the times of year that don’t experience high call volumes? Does all the technology go to waste? Nope! CXone is run on the cloud, allowing you to scale up and down at a moment’s notice, making it one of the most elastic contact center solutions available. Plus, you can customize CXone for any time of year and any type of retail business. With tailored packages of every size, small businesses and global enterprises alike can find strategic value in CXone, holiday season or not!

Weather the storm

The busy season for contact centers doesn’t have to be so chaotic and stressful. CXone’s automation and AI will enhance agent efficiency and allow customers to solve many of their problems on their own. Managers will have predictive insights to plan for staffing requirements and will be able to make sure agents are all working from the same source of data and information. When contact center calls are the only time customers might interact with a company representative, making sure their issues get solved in a timely manner with a personalized feel is a great way to build client trust and spread some holiday cheer!

Contact us today to learn more about how NICE CXone can transform your contact center and make every customer experience extraordinary.