If you missed the other entries in this series be sure to catch them here:
- CS Week Trends - Personalization and Segmentation
- CS Week Trends - Part 3 - EVs and Customer Engagement
Virtually every session in the Contact Center tracks at CS Week invoked the challenge of delivering service in an age of increasing delinquencies, rising rates/bills, and disengaged customers. I was impressed with the diversity of the sessions, which clearly tracked some of the major trends.
Utilities at the sessions spoke to the employee experience (EX) challenges related to recruiting and retention, as well as a new wrinkle in the retention mission - dealing with the mental and motivational health of agents in order to improve retention. Among my colleagues in our contact center business, we hear similar trends especially in US operations. Companies find it difficult to recruit and retain younger team members for their customer service centers. Utilities face increased ancillary costs in refreshing their centers, adding amenities to "google-ify" their spaces, and provide significantly increased coaching and employee support services as in investment in retention. I've read recently quite a bit about companies finding success with older workers taking these traditionally entry level jobs as they come to the job with a much different perspective and support expectation.
It's also clear that utilities face major challenges attempting to return to the office, and appear to have largely shifted to a permanent remote/telework or hybrid office strategy where customer service will predominately shift to Work@Home staffing. We've seen remote and hybrid work well, and its especially attractive to the agent community, but puts special strain on managerial and coaching staff. Be sure to invest in tools, practices, and support for managers who have to maintain productivity AND retention in these environments. A lot of coaching and team building used to happen after meetings in casual engagements or in "hallway chatter" that doesn't have the same outlet in remote work. Coaches and leaders need new tools and strategies to foster new ways to develop productivity, provide coaching, and build teams when people aren't physically co-located. We're fans of "always on" cameras, more ice-breakers, and tools like Slack to maintain engagement across remote and hybrid work lines.
It may not be easy to see from within the industry, but utilities face many of the same challenges in their contact center and customer service programs that other industries face. Fortunately, forums like CS Week enable practitioners and vendors to share best practices in a non-competitive environment. We expect utilities to examine some of the new technology and practices that other industries have embraced as they manage through the retention and remote work disruptions so common to the industry in the US.