It may be a new year but the turbulent times roiling contact centers aren’t going away anytime soon. Healthcare, utilities, insurance providers and others are still handling fallout from 2021’s unprecedented number of weather and climate-related disasters. And, as we get our heads around the fact that this really is our third year of a pandemic, many organizations will feel they’re only just finding their feet in the COVID era.

With many in-person services still not available, and often no longer preferred, contact centers continue to field surges in call volume. The Omicron variant and potential successors likely also will keep fueling growing consumer preferences for online access to their chosen goods and services.

This new normal means the time has come for those businesses that haven’t already done so to be preparing more robust strategies for 2022 and beyond.

Change, though, is challenging. Sometimes switching a system out appears to be more trouble than it’s worth, especially when schedules are pushed to the limit and effective agents are so hard to recruit and retain. It can seem expedient to keep things going as they are, patching dated programs, taking hits from customer gripes and experiencing low staff morale as inevitable side effects of global factors.

But, there are warnings for businesses who choose to continue fighting small fires as and when they flare up. On the customer’s end of the line, every poor experience with your company takes its toll. A message reflected in a benchmark consumer survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers warned starkly of the dangers of complacency.

• In the US, even when people love a company or product, 59% will walk away after several bad experiences, and 17% after just one bad experience.
• 32% of customers outside of the US would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience.
• In Latin America, 49% say they’d walk away from a brand after one bad experience.

We all know good customer experience is frictionless. Yet, all too often callers have to make repeated attempts to solve the same query—causing frustration that totally undermines your efforts to create a positive experience for your callers.

At Gridspace, we know that customers want speedy pickups, first-call resolution, or a seamless handover if rerouted. The past few years have confirmed what our team at Gridspace already believed to be true: People will happily accept virtual agents if the technology feels more human in quality and scope. And, experience empathetic, personalized conversations rather than lists of options or curt phrases robotically reeled off.

Our software supercharges contact centers and developers so they quickly understand customer requests, synchronize agent responses and drive successful outcomes. Our platform product, Gridspace Sift, provides real-time transcription and analysis that shows performance at agent, team and site level. Live trendspotting technology surfaces trend across concurrent calls, while tightly integrated QA and dispute management workflows simplify resolutions. Leading contact centers are using Sift to navigate and resolve the new and complex customer issues arising from the pandemic.

Add-on premiums include real-time agent guidance (Gridspace Relay) and state-of-the-art voice biometrics for ultrafast enrollment and call verification—through the entire call, not just at the beginning.

Our industry-leading voice bot, Gridspace Grace, automates routine voice tasks in large contact centers, fine-tuned for specific task sets and real-world performances. Inbound calls are digitally contained and successfully resolved. Conversations are fluent, consistent and friendly in tone. Use cases are designed to take the strain off valuable trained staff so they can get on with adding maximum value to your organization.

For example, hospitals can free up healthcare professionals while our software deals with:

• Patient routing
• Appointment reminders
• Payer and provider forms
• Benefit claims
• Pharmacy transactions

And the clincher—switching is easier than you think.

Gridspace products integrate with your existing voice tech, allowing call centers to get started quickly, scale at their own pace and focus on customer experience not infrastructure integrations. And to make things even easier, new connectors for your favorite contact center as a service (CCaaS) and CRMs make data integrations a breeze.

Make a resolution to book a demonstration at www.gridspace.com and discover how Gridspace could be the boost your business needs this year.