Our study “Is the Future of Service at Home?” for ASAPP, an AI Cloud company, was recently published. Conducted from March to April 2022, we queried 572 Customer Support, Sales and Technical Agents who live and work in the United States their feelings about returning to pre-pandemic work conditions. As a result we found that 85% of Customer Service Agents want to work full-time at home and not return to contact center offices, and that almost nine out of ten agents want to see more aspects of customer interactions automated. This is mainly due to the fact that the use of automation can allow customer service personnel to assist more clients at a given time, as opposed to telephone support which limits agents to handling one customer at a time. Macario Namie, ASAPP Chief Strategy Officer had this to say “Contact center operations are rethinking how to make their agents more successful, which requires a whole new way of thinking and operating. This will need a new investment in technologies that transform contact center agents’ productivity beyond the constraints of incremental technology. Appealing to the 85% of agents that want to work from home (WFH) could stave off competition for employees from other industries and help reduce recruitment costs and attrition rates, Contact Centers have the biggest opportunity in decades to advance agent productivity with artificial intelligence technology, new automation processes and workflows, which can also support CX workforce demands wherever they work. With an estimated $15 billion spent in the United States annually for contact center real estate—that is unwanted, and unused—monies could be repurposed into new technology investments.”
Read more at Contact Center World.
Author Notes:
Jeffrey Henning
