contact center

Happy agents lead to happy customers. Frustrated agents lead to frustrated customers. This is common-sense - but the striking reality is that most contact center agents are not happy. They are too busy navigating and switching from one app to another, getting distracted, ignoring key information, and missing key performance metrics. They don’t have the time or the tools to be happy.

Meanwhile, customers are forced to deal with longer handle times, longer queues, and inconsistent responses and results.

Conference season is in full swing, and in the past two weeks I attended three analyst summits – RingCentral, 8x8, and Five9. All three were in beautiful and unique venues, with fun activities and time for networking and socializing. There was no shortage of content, with tons of new announcements, roadmap insights, and customer testimonials.

Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2023 may be “rizz,” but for those of us in the business communications world, the word of the year was definitely “artificial intelligence” (okay, that’s two words) or “generative AI” (three words?). Looking back on 2023, anything having to do with AI was hot, and anything related to generative AI was even hotter.