There’s a new category of workers that provides a huge untapped market opportunity for service providers.

With the increase of informal or casual contact centers, a new type of worker is rising to the forefront – what we’re calling “engagement workers.” Most businesses have several groups of knowledge and information workers that don’t operate like contact center agents, but provide similar functions – notably responding to customer or employee issues and problems, answering questions, and providing service and support. These employees spend a good part of their workday engaging and interacting with customers, although they are not part of a formal contact center and are not considered customer service agents. They may be IT workers, finance or human resources specialists, or any kind of subject matter expert, and have jobs outside of processing and handling customer inquiries.

Engagement workers are expected to juggle many balls and handle multiple situations, such as taking orders, answering billing questions, addressing quality issues, and even providing basic technical assistance. They can provide value in any number of ways – from supplementing the formal contact center and handling overflow calls when call traffic gets too heavy, to providing specific subject matter expertise when needed.

Engagement Worker Challenges

While informal contact centers and engagement workers provide an important function, it can be challenging to ensure the availability and quality of these employees who have other responsibilities or priorities. There may not be a consistent way to collect and analyze customer feedback, implement best practices, or measure worker performance. Therefore, informal call centers need to not just connect customers with the right engagement workers and employees across different channels and devices, but to measure and analyze call flows, manage the workforce, and optimize worker performance.

Engagement workers need the right tools and technologies to be effective, but at an appropriate price point. Most formal contact centers have access to a large variety of realtime and historical reporting and analysis capabilities. However, these tools come at a cost, and are generally out of reach for most informal contact centers. While some of the technology needs are the same as those of formal contact centers, organizations don’t want to pay for full-blown contact center capabilities with all the bells and whistles, and prefer solutions specifically developed for their needs.

In addition, engagement workers are most likely to be using the contact center software interchangeably with standard telephony, so the ROI on equipping these workers with contact center software might be lengthy when compared to “full-time agents.” Deploying lower cost reporting tools for engagement workers can help improve the ROI.

Conclusion

With the right tools for providing insights and supporting data-driven decision-making, engagement workers and informal contact centers can be as effective as formal contact center agents.

Akixi offers cost-effective customer engagement insights and reporting for informal contact centers, with real-time and historic trend analysis and reporting, and proactive notifications. Working with Akixi, service provider can offer customers the tools to enhance engagement worker responsiveness and performance, while optimizing resources and improve the customer experience, without incurring the expense of full-blown contact center solutions.

By Blair Pleasant
President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion

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