“The industry average is about 45% attrition rate for agents. It takes 40 days to hire a new agent. Things like agent assist, real-time coaching, those are the types of things that are going to make your employees want to stay around and stick with your company,” said Matt Miller, Senior Enterprise Solutions Consultant for Five9. Product capabilities such as access to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, chat and messaging tools, and other technologies can help employees better serve customers and manage their workloads. This too can help to improve employee morale and reduce turnover. “There’s a shortage of employees and existing employees are overworked…adding in a technology like the self-service option really helps augment your teams,” said Aqeel Shahid, Vice President of Global Strategic Partners at Vonage. If an agent wants to extend the call beyond an initial interaction, an AI bot can provide the agent with context with the communication that took place between the bot and individual. “It’s literally drag and drop icons, and it creates the entire workflow, and it can now reference via APIs into any of the custom applications that people are using,” Shahid said, including Salesforce and database applications. “You can scale your organizations without having to add an additional full-time or full-time equivalent employee”. Technology Trends In terms of CCaaS, two key trends to watch in the next 12 months emerged from discussions at AVANT’s Special Forces Summit, held in September 2022. Those trends are: the use of AI + chatbots for customer experience and contact centers, and application integration, including the use of low-code/no-code tools to create workflows and applications. Copyright © 2023 AVANT Communications, Inc. CCaaS 6-12 Report | 10