Market and Technology Trends As companies learned during the early stages of the pandemic, CCaaS solutions have the benefit of enabling flexible working arrangements. The previous CCaaS 6-12 report, published in June 2021, noted the following about how the pandemic might impact contact centers: Some experts anticipate a 60-40 mix, where about 40% of employees work remotely. Others predict that, as work-from-anywhere gains further ground, the legacy emphasis on brick-and-mortar facilities will decline even more — augmented by an opportunity for businesses to get reduced leases in commercial office space and a chance to hire the best-qualified applicants, wherever they live. There are ongoing debates about where employees will be working, but modern CCaaS systems can help management overcome these issues. Why do supervisors care (about remote work)? It’s because they can’t monitor their agent’s performance. If they’re all spread out across all 50 states, they “can’t understand what’s happening in the contact center. Now we can monitor every phone call live, not later on, and we can jump into the calls that need my attention right away. - Steve Forcum, former Head of Solution Marketing & Chief Evangelist for Avaya By continuing to offer employees the ability to work from home, contact centers can help to reduce employee turnover and improve retention. Another way to retain employees — give them meaningful work. Offload mundane, repetitive work to chatbots and conversational assistants. “Businesses must focus on retaining agents by making it easy for them to do their work. Make it easy to find the information to provide good customer service. Don’t make them search 15 different databases,” said Brent Wilford, Senior Director of CX and Unified Communications for AVANT. He cited research showing that 78% of leaders are investing in more self-service to make lives for agents better. Copyright © 2023 AVANT Communications, Inc. CCaaS 6-12 Report | 9