It’s that time of year again. If you’re a CX leader in the retail or hospitality space, you’re bracing yourself for your busiest season, while other businesses have their eye on the eggnog as they prepare to hunker down until the new year. As we move into the holidays, not to mention the post-holiday sales, you’re no doubt already doing all you can to keep your contact center running like clockwork during this hectic period. The good news is there’s a lot that AI can do to help you lower stress levels during this time, now and in the future.
1. AI for workforce management
The first step is, of course, to make sure you’re prepped and have your agents set up for success. With agent attrition on the rise (companies are facing a 52% annual attrition rate according to Deloitte’s global CX survey), putting your agents first is essential. Deploying agents at the right time is, of course, paramount in order to be efficient and prevent burnout: no small feat when you’re managing a remote or hybrid workforce. It’s also vital to confirm you have the right agent lined up. Matching an agent’s skills to the query helps avoid customer frustration and creates the necessary efficiencies as call volumes rise.
Apply analytics and forecasting to scheduling
First, dive into historical data to make a plan. A good WFM tool can pull insights from your last peak season to predict the ideal schedule for your next busy period. AI-generated scheduling can determine and make recommendations for shifts based on requirements from the forecast. You can track and manage unexpected occurrences and optimize your schedule by flexing breaks, lunches, and even start times based on your requirements. And with long-term forecasting, you can plan resourcing several months in the future to ensure your holiday shifts are covered.
Give your agents control over their shifts
Another way to prevent agent burnout is to give your team some control over their schedules. During a time when they may want to enjoy the festivities with loved ones, using AI for shift bidding can help them feel empowered and more likely to stick it out for the long haul. Shift bidding works by giving agents shifts to bid on, while AI analyzes predefined contact center requirements to determine which shifts are needed most. A ranking system then awards shifts based on agent preference and rankings. This means less-popular shifts are more fairly distributed, which helps agents feel more motivated and minimizes supervisor stress.
2. AI for self-service
Why not free up your agents and let your virtual agent take more of the grunt work during the holiday season? Recent developments in AI are making conversational AI solutions more intuitive and easier to build. Today, your team can create flows fast, and you can assign your virtual agent a subset of queries, freeing up your agents to solve the more complex, time-consuming questions. AI can help resolve the issue entirely or level up the call effectively.
But remember, your virtual agent is only as good as its knowledge. This is where AI can help again—by creating a next-level knowledge base.
3. AI for faster resolution
A significant way to invigorate your team during high call volume periods is to implement AI in such a way that they have the resources they need to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Ensuring your knowledge management system is fully stocked with useful, relevant content is a good place to start. There are two key benefits to an up-to-date knowledge base:
- Your customers can self-serve more effectively via your virtual agent
- Your agents can quickly access all the information they need
By allowing you to curate and serve up useful knowledge base articles and historical customer data, AI can help customers self-serve without an agent’s support. If they do need to speak to an agent, that team member can quickly resolve issues for new and returning customers by accessing the resources they need when they need them, live on a call.
4. AI to speed up after-call work
Due to periods of high call volume, agents are bound to drop like flies from burnout this holiday season or, at the very least, get cranky with customers. When after-call work is a manual process, agents can sometimes do the bare minimum or avoid doing it altogether just to get to the next call quicker. This becomes a sticking point for customers: with no recorded history of their calls, they have to repeat all the details again the next time they connect. We’ve all been there.
AI can really give you an easy win here by helping your agents summarize their interactions within a couple of clicks. A simple, yet invaluable tool that will help your team save time and allow your customers to move on quickly.
5. AI for seamless hand-offs
Another frustration for customers is having to repeat themselves several times during the same engagement when being passed from agent to subject matter expert. It’s a loop of frustration that consumers know only too well. AI comes into play here, too, by providing hand-offs from agent to back-office expert. With an AI-generated summary, the next person the customer speaks to will have all the context on the screen and can catch up on the issue with a quick glance.
6. AI for quality management
If you’re managing a remote or hybrid team this holiday season, effective quality management can be a challenge without the right tools in place. Disparate systems make it hard to navigate and measure effectiveness. AI can help save a lot of time and enable more accuracy in quality management. With the right solution, you can quickly gain valuable insights into your team's performance and interactions, without the laborious job of having to go through each engagement manually.
7. AI for deeper analytics
The busiest time of year in the contact center is often prime time to collect data, but it’s hard to prioritize data collection when your team is stretched so thin. With AI, you can significantly lessen the load.
In speech analytics, AI can be applied to the platform's native recording searches and playback features to pull consolidated data. Quality managers or supervisors can then evaluate the quality of the conversations, and use scorecards to evaluate performance and coach agents.
AI can also transform customer surveys. Surveys often represent a very small segment of customer sentiment. Plus, you will also find that people will submit surveys when they are truly happy or extremely disappointed, which is a bigger risk for retailers, hoteliers, and other service providers during the holiday season. In the future, AI could leverage data from quality management, scheduling, and coaching sessions directly to formulate customer insights that just aren’t attainable via surveys alone.
The possibility of a more connected and empowered team with contact center AI software
So there you have it. AI can take over the grunt work for your team, and help reduce the stress you, or your CX leader, is feeling during your busiest periods.
We hope this holiday survival guide for CX leaders gives you food for thought this holiday season and sends you into the new year with fresh ideas for implementing AI. Holding on to your two best assets — your agents and your customers — is a surefire way to boost your business in 2025.
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