Closing the Capacity Gap
Two years after the pandemic upended contact center operations, many managers are finding that they still face challenges finding enough staff to meet customer demand. What was an unusual situation has now become a continuing structural problem that affects how centers source, locate and engage with their agents. Centers are facing a capacity gap between the demand for their interaction handling services and the resources that are available.
In fact, the original decades-old issue of high turnover and a tenuous agent pipeline never went away. If anything, it was exacerbated by the pandemic. As the industry pivots away from voice towards digital interaction channels, the issues have become more severe. The nature of the work that agents are tasked with is changing. As growing self-service capabilities deflect the easy interactions, agents are left with harder, more sensitive issues that require more time, care and skills to handle. This can force agents into single-channel silos, causing inefficiency and poor customer experiences.