The Critical Role of Employees in Today’s Digital World
Here at Verint, we’ve recently completed our most successful global customer conference ever, with more than 1,000 customers and partners joining us in Las Vegas, Nevada. Following this conference, I attended the Glastonbury festival in the U.K., one of the largest music festivals in the world and home to 175,000 attendees for five days every June.
But, wasn’t the Internet and digitization was supposed to end all of this? By now, we were supposed to have replaced the need to fly to meetings and the need for face-to-face business engagements with video conferencing. We were also no longer going to attend live music events and would instead be watching events live from the comfort of our home rather than in Wellington boots in a muddy English field. Yet the conference circuit has never been healthier. And, while recording revenue has declined, live music is now the most important revenue stream for many artists.
It seems that the human need to share, participate and engage is as strong as ever, even in today’s digital world.
Just as musicians are tapping into the value of live interactions with their audience, businesses are doing the same. In recent years, we have seen an increased focus by businesses on customer engagement. Customers are willing to pay more for improved services and experiences.
In the contact center, for example, it is no longer sufficient to only offer email or voice customer support options. Leading customer service organizations are now offering more personal engagement options such as chat, co-browse and video, to help strengthen the relationship between the customer and the organization—and to fulfil the customer’s desire for a more personal experience.
Many customers also still demand live interactions for specific inquiries. Therefore, businesses must become smart. Employees are a critical but expensive resource, and it is neither cost effective nor necessary to offer customers live interactions with an agent for every customer query. For example, I don’t need to talk to an agent to get the balance of my bank account or to renew my car insurance policy. However, I do need direct engagement with an agent for a loan, a mortgage application or an insurance claim. Organizations must engage smarter and offer live engagement options where appropriate and automate where appropriate.
At Verint, we have a variety of software solutions that help organizations engage smarter and optimize the use of their critical employee resources. Our Smart Engagement software functionality automates the allocation and prioritization of work to customer service agents from multiple customer channels and matches the customer issue and channel with the right employee skills. BPM and Case Management software helps enable our customers to automate high volume, repetitive processes and free employees to focus on where they can add the most value. Verint Workforce Management helps ensure that organizations match employee skills and availability to customer demand.
In today’s digital world, employees still have a crucial role to play. Attempts to automate the employee out of the customer service equation have not been successful. Today, customers who are frustrated with multiple telephone menu options or who have difficulty reaching a customer service agent can easily go elsewhere. The ability to offer live customer engagement options remains a powerful differentiator. Businesses simply need to think smarter about how and when their critical human resources are deployed.
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