Tips for Improving Processes or Adopting New Technology
Submitted by SingleComm
While process-improving technology is a must for contact centers that want to stay competitive and improve customer experience, putting new technologies to use can mean growing pains, slow implementation, and frustrated employees. Patient experience ensures that your agents can connect patients to providers efficiently and securely.
In this article, we’ll discuss some common pain points contact centers experience when adopting new technologies or processes.
What Is Process Improvement?
Process improvement involves identifying, analyzing, and improving existing business processes to optimize performance, meet best practice standards, or improve user experience.
Often, the catalyst for process improvement comes in the form of a new technology solution. For example, the printing press allowed the production of books to increase drastically because the process of how books were made fundamentally changed.
How Technology Improves Business Processes
A large part of improving processes involves identifying inefficiencies and, when possible, streamlining them. These are two things that tech solutions excel at.
Tech applications can shine a light on redundant sections of processes and have the capability to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks. This enables contact centers to reduce the cost of operation, save time, focus on other tasks, and speed up business operations.
Common Pain Points
Identifying opportunities and successfully managing through change can be painful but failing to innovate can be a death sentence for a business. With that in mind, here are some of the most common pain points organizations must work through when adopting a process change or new technology.
Cost
Cost is a significant factor in a contact center’s decision to adopt new technology. By quickly identifying deficiencies and enabling contact centers to make fast, efficient changes that optimize time-to-market, helps users to reduce their costs by about 40 percent.
Employee Buy-in
When a team member is unsure of a new technology or process, there is a good chance they will avoid embracing it fully, making the technology seem ineffective and causing the team member to become even more skeptical of the new solution. It’s a cycle that can be incredibly harmful to innovation.
Employees can have a variety of reasons for being hesitant about embracing new technologies or processes:
- Lack of awareness about the purpose and reason for the change.
- Adherence to an old methodology that they feel comfortable using.
- Belief that the new process or technology might make them redundant.
- Too busy to devote time to learning a new system.
Adoption Speed
The time between deciding on a new technology solution and having it fully implemented can be a tedious journey. Waiting for agents to become proficient with a platform can end up having the opposite of the desired effects of the new technology. Instead of happier customers and decreased call times, you end up with agents fumbling through a new interface and customers spending extra time on the phone.
Lack of Resources and Support
Even if there is complete buy-in from every agent, a lack of proper training and support can stymie the adaptation of new technology.
SingleComm is the cloud-based all-in-one call center software solution that helps contact centers train agents faster, turn data into actionable insights, and save big on operating expenses.