The Great Resignation: How to turn it into an opportunity for your contact center

Learn about Zeus Kerravala’s insights on how contact centers can leverage the Great Resignation to attract and retain the most qualified talent.

Two years ago, the world was forced to rethink working models. Work was decoupled from location and an unprecedented amount of people started looking for new jobs in favor of better opportunities—in the U.S. 4.4 million workers voluntarily left their jobs in February 2022, and  55% of the U.S. workforce is expected to churn in 2022.

What does this mean to the contact center industry? With a pretty high churn rate even before the pandemic, the contact center industry hit twice the historical numbers during the COVID-19 breakout. Instead of looking at this as a business disruptor, organizations can leverage the Great Resignation to attract and retain the best talent for the contact center.

In a recent Talkdesk and ZK Research webinar, Zeus Kerravala explored the opportunities the Great Resignation presents for the contact center, covering topics such as why investing in CX is a main differentiating factor and how contact centers can create “super agents”.

Investing in CX is the main differentiator for companies.

Customers want simplicity and transparency. It is imperative for them to receive easy and fast replies to their inquiries, to get proactive contacts from brands, and to be aware of a brand’s social stance. Talkdesk Research™ data report that almost half of Gen Z consumers stopped using a company’s services or products because of its views on social issues. Moreover, this isn’t a generational thing—Millennials, Gen Xers, and baby boomers have expressed similar feelings for corporate social responsibility.

This evolution of customer demands is the main reason for businesses to have digital transformation plans that involve customer experience (CX), as it is the top brand differentiator and, ultimately, the main factor for a company’s success. One bad experience ruins the entire relationship.

Create super-agents with the help of AI.

What we’re seeing now is that sales, marketing, customer success, and customer service are converging to create more value and increase revenue. Well-trained agents with the right tools have the knowledge to transform the contact center into a profit center, leveraging interactions to drive more sales. But, to do so, organizations need up-level talent.

As stated during the discussion, there are two different ways to face the Great Resignation: seeing it as a business disruptor that will cause more friction or as an opportunity to get talent from the competition and hire outside the geographic area.

People want to work for companies that allow them to be successful—and that requires giving them proper tools. If you attract your agents with a highly competitive salary, but you’re running an on-premises call center with only-voice capabilities, you’re setting your agents up for failure and they’ll eventually leave. A cloud contact center with the best integrated systems, including artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, is the key to keeping the best talent and ensuring the success of your contact center.

Combining top talent with a contact center platform fueled with AI features empowers companies to create super-agents and:

• Give faster and better responses to customer inquiries.

As more interactions are solved with the help of AI, human agents will have a more strategic role and handle more complex tasks. Speech and text analytics empower agents to find key conversational moments suggesting the next best action to deliver a smoother and frictionless customer experience.

• Refine agent skills more accurately. 

Removing low complexity and repetitive tasks from agents allows them to refine their skills to deliver high-value interactions that require other types of skills. With improved training and gamification, companies can upgrade their agents so they’re capable of performing critical functions.

• Revamp management model.

Improved contact center management tools allow managers to maximize the potential of every agent, measuring and tracking performance over time and capitalizing on opportunities for improvement.

To wrap up.

As AI technology gets more advanced, new opportunities emerge for organizations. To stay ahead of the curve, take a look at what’s happening in conversational AI and how AI is changing the role of the contact center agent.

Learn more with the following resources:

Talkdesk Research™ report: The future of AI in the contact center
Webinar with Zeus Kerravala: The Great Resignation and agent engagement
Brochure: A quick guide to Talkdesk AI