Reports, White Papers and Latest Resources

Reports and White papers represent a great way to read in depth about some of the issues facing call centres.


Return to office? Stay fully remote? Shift to hybrid? It’s the duel of the decade, and both leadership and the workforce have their own thoughts and preferences. However, providing a consistent employee experience from wherever employees clock in is critical regardless of the organization’s direction.

When it comes to embracing AI technology in your contact centre, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype. McKinsey estimates that AI adoption has more than doubled in the past five years. Yet, adoption and successful implementation are two different things.

With the rapid rise of AI, the question is often asked whether eventually there will even be a need for people to work in contact centres, answering calls.

Watch this webinar for some fresh thinking on improving your contact centre service levels – from addressing attrition problems and rethinking your agent groupings, through to the ways technology, such as Conversational AI, can support 24/7 customer service and automate repetitive tasks.

This guide offers an accessible overview of VoiceBot tech that will help any CX leader assess whether AI is a sound investment for their business.

In the ever-evolving landscape of banking customer service, the contact center plays an increasingly important role in deposit retention and customer loyalty.

See how five trendsetting organisations — of diverse sizes and industries — have harnessed the power of modern cloud solutions to overcome traditional CX challenges, setting new benchmarks in both customer and employee engagement.

At Five9, our focus revolves around bringing Joy to CX. We are committed to bringing our customers the power of people and technology to enable their CX success.

Get exclusive access to the comprehensive guide that reveals how to transform customer and employee experiences with artificial intelligence.

Common frontline challenges such as high error rates, knowledge gaps, fluctuating performance, low morale, and high attrition rates have two things in common: they result in a poor customer experience and are all resolvable by driving consistency within the organization.

Creating a positive workplace for agents is crucial, reducing turnover and boosting productivity.

In this vendor profile, IDC analyst Hayley Sutherland analyzes Uniphore’s complete product suite, highlights Uniphore as a significant player in the conversational AI market, and “analyzes the company’s unique approach to conversational AI and automation, as well as its strategy of regular innovations and acquisitions, which have expanded its coverage of the customer journey.”

Occupancy, utilization, and productivity. Three familiar metrics that are critical to managing and planning every contact center. The problem, is, they all sound very similar and are sometimes confused with one another. In this eBook, we demystify these three terms and equip you to understand them, measure them, and improve them.

Are you looking for ways to automate the quality assurance process in your contact center using AI but need help convincing other stakeholders?

Whether you deliver an excellent or a poor CX is a competitive differentiator – brand loyalty is almost always predicated on the products, services and support that customers receive. But knowing where to start and how to make improvements across your business when it comes to enhancing CX isn’t easy.

This MIT Technology Review Insights report explores how businesses across industries are rethinking the future of CX, the value proposition for employees and the role of the contact centre.

There’s always room for improvement when it comes to Workforce Management, but over time it can become increasingly difficult to decide where best to focus your efforts for maximum impact. If you’re concerned your strategy has become stale, watch this webinar for fresh inspiration and new ways to optimise your Workforce Management.

Gamification is more than a buzzword – it is a solid strategy that boosts employee motivation, engagement, and performance.

Vulnerable customers are easy to spot right? Well, not really. In today’s world, anyone can find themselves in a vulnerable position at any time. This makes vulnerability difficult to detect. New research reveals the five UK consumer groups most at risk of vulnerability today - and the awareness gap keeping them hidden.

In the evolving world of contact centres, AI has become more than just a tech trend; it’s changing how businesses connect with customers.

Could the secret to business performance improvement lie in what your customers are already telling you? The voice of the customer (VoC) means so much more than just a few-question survey at the end of a contact centre interaction, or upon receipt of your latest order. Every word your customers exchange with your sales, customer support, CX, finance teams and more could be essential to driving transformational change within your business. The businesses profiled in this eBook are analysing 100% of customer conversations in an omnichannel environment using conversation intelligence technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform every area of business, and that power brings new opportunities for growth. It also raises many questions about how and what to deploy to serve your unique goals. While incremental improvements like automation and new digital channels provide quick wins, long-term innovation requires that and more.

AI solutions are currently transforming the contact center industry, and forward-thinking organizations are using advanced workforce management applications to improve agent experience.

Cut through the hyped-up marketing messages and get our level-headed assessment of what you can realistically achieve using Contact Center AI.

Assembled surveyed hundreds of WFM and customer support professionals across more than a dozen industries to ask them about their benchmarks, challenges, and priorities both now and in the year ahead.

Did you know 71% of organisations limit themselves to only gathering feedback that is directly requested, using methods such as surveys? Yet, the unsolicited feedback obtained from day-to-day omnichannel interactions (such as chat, text, email) represents the majority of customer opinions - along with a major untapped opportunity for organisations!

Motivating and improving the performance of contact centre agents is top-of-mind for every customer service department. As self-service channels increasingly take care of customers’ basic requests, contact centre agents are fielding more complex customer inquiries.

Artificial Intelligence has arguably been the biggest buzz word of 2023 – thanks to ChatGPT crash-landing into (almost) every element of our lives at the turn of the year.

When artificial intelligence (AI) is integrated into business strategy, your business can provide outstanding customer experience (CX) seamlessly and effectively. This guide to AI for CX outlines the key AI technologies most helpful for improving CX and explains how these technologies benefit customers, agents, supervisors, management, and other stakeholders.

Download this brand-new Contact Center Manager's Guide to finding the right Conversation Intelligence platform for your contact center.

Get access to this global white paper from Metrigy to gain insights on the growing impact video has in the Contact Center space and how you can get a competitive edge against the competition. Video continues to be a critical communication channel for teams to collaborate in and outside the office, but what about Contact Center interactions between CSRs and customers?

Your business succeeds when customers get what they want and need. And to consistently deliver on that brand promise, you need an exceptional workforce.

The axiom ‘money talks’ applies to WFM software!

In a landscape of stringent regulations, addressing customer vulnerabilities is crucial. These interactions are pivotal for contact centers—success boosts loyalty, failure risks non-compliance, distress, and loss. Discover our guidelines for scoring interactions with customer vulnerability. This scoring method provides deep insights, aiding agents in understanding nuances, identifying strengths, and guiding improvement.

Is a team only as good as its tools? Or are the tools only as good as the team using them? From WFM and QA platforms to help desks and telephony tools — see how your customer support tech stack stacks up.

In the ever-evolving landscape of contact centres, say hello to the strategic insights that are crucial to staying ahead.

While your website generates a lot of traffic, you’re likely missing out on conversions. But identifying which customers abandon your site — and why — is challenging. You need a way to engage your customers proactively before they leave your site. That’s where predictive engagement comes in.

Improving CX performance is always front of mind for every contact centre leader. Even more so at this time of year – with 2024 wide open for fresh ideas and opportunity. But with so much on the table to explore – from the increasing capabilities of AI, through to self-service and personalisation – it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts for maximum impact. Sound familiar? Watch this webinar to learn 7 proven strategies to prepare your contact centre for success across 2024 and beyond.

This essential tool allows you to proactively identify and address issues within your contact center or business, ensuring top-notch service in every interaction. By unveiling hidden challenges and providing targeted training insights, our scorecard empowers your agents to excel in crucial moments.

AI and automation are dominating customer service – and the hype has reached fever pitch. The terms AI and superpower are thrown around daily, and there are high expectations for artificial intelligence’s power to transform the entire economy. But the belief that our future will be dominated by robots is a far cry from reality.

We'd love to tell you that setting up your Workforce Management system is a complete walk in the park, and you can do it in two clicks, but... we'd simply be insulting your intelligence as a Workforce Manager, Operations Director or IT Manager.

Far too many teams rely on spreadsheets or legacy systems to get jobs done, with a recent Gartner survey stating that 45% of customer service reps avoid adopting new technologies by relying on legacy systems and tools. Not sure where to start in your search for better and faster workforce management?

According to Gartner research, 80% of gamification projects will fail. This is probably not a surprise – especially to those who have unsuccessfully tried to implement gamification into their strategy. Gamification can quickly lose its appeal (and potential impact) without the right approach.

Expectations are high for generative AI — and for good reason. As an evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), it enables businesses to precisely automate customer conversations. They can extract more insight from them, too.

As the industry continued to adapt to the post-pandemic world, 2023 also saw fresh challenges emerge – from driving the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) agenda forward to reacting to the cost-of-living crisis and the arrival of ChatGPT.

Within the customer contact space, there is a great deal of interest in how AI can work to deliver a superior customer experience at every hour of the day, across channels, leveraging the vast amounts of data that are available to many large organisations. Supported by the speed and availability of affordable processing power, and the enormous amount of structured and unstructured data available, the opportunity exists for AI to take customer contact far beyond what is feasible now. “The Inner Circle Guide to AI, Chatbots & Machine Learning” is one of the Inner Circle series of Contact Babel analyst reports investigating key customer contact solutions.

Generative AI is redefining how businesses operate, make decisions and interact with their customers. But that’s just the start. The advent of enterprise generative AI—purpose-built generative AI for enterprise applications—is unlocking new capabilities and solving key challenges that were previously unimaginable.

This eBook is a comprehensive guide to navigating the intricacies of workforce management in this vibrant industry. Designed to empower you - workforce managers, planners, and forecasters - with the knowledge and tools to harness these changes and steer your contact centers toward unprecedented success.

If you’re not monitoring every interaction, you’re missing out. To truly understand your customers’ experience – the good, the bad and the ugly – you need the full picture. This research, created in partnership with ContactBabel, illustrates the modern CX landscape, helping you invest your QA time and resource where it’ll have the most impact.

Every contact centre leader knows the mandate: Reduce costs, but don’t let customer satisfaction slip. Yet it’s difficult to achieve this goal when you and your agents can’t visualise and measure customer behavior across service channels.

For years now, hybrid work has increasingly become the new normal for millions of knowledge workers around the world.

This new eBook examines the shifting AI technology landscape for CRM, customer data, contact centre and digital operations, and suggests that – rather than technology – it is disconnected customer journeys and silos that now represent the barriers to evolution.

Your new hire has accepted your offer and confirmed their start date. But will they show up for their first day? The odds might not be in your favor. While first-day ghosting is considered a widespread problem, it is not a problem, per se; rather, it is a result of poor pre-boarding processes. But organizations have the power to turn this around, and Centrical’s Pre-boarding Cheat Sheet can help.

The guide gives a definitive view of the state of the art in workforce optimisation. It reveals the products available, the realities of implementation and predictions of what the future holds.

The way we do business has changed. The shift away from in-person service has driven greater reliance on contact centers. And customer service representatives (CSRs) are now working in a hybrid capacity — supporting customers from both the office and from home. Making this transition was difficult, but we’ve learned a lot.

Building better relationships with your customers starts with employees. For call centres, there’s a direct correlation between their performance, job satisfaction and high turnover.

The cost-of-living crisis has put pressure on contact centres to do more with less, as their overheads increase, while their customers become more demanding than ever – increasingly turning to their service providers for support as they struggle with their finances too. So where do you start? This webinar will help you learn more about where your current technology, people, and processes could be holding you back – with tips and tricks to optimise your contact centre efficiency.

In a world where consumers seek swift resolutions to their inquiries, self-service has emerged as a transformative solution. Even prior to the pandemic’s long customer service wait times, a surge in interest was evident. The potential for self-service to benefit both companies and customers is immense, with enhanced digital adoption and soaring customer satisfaction metrics.

The world’s best contact centres realise the value of data-driven feedback, both in real time and post-interaction.

More than ever, businesses need to operate with speed, agility and scalability, all while remaining productive and secure. The challenge is meeting these ambitions without compromising on the most important thing of all: the experience of your customers and agents. In fact, their expectations are higher than ever before.

Contact center business process outsourcers (BPOs or “outsourcers”) have similar goals and challenges to in-house contact centers - and some additional ones of their own. They’ve got to keep several plates spinning at all times. Do they have a secret sauce that helps them to achieve that?

An estimated half of all customers engage on three to five channels during each journey toward making a purchase or resolving a request. Those interactions generate a lot of data you can use to improve efficiency.

The days of rigid adherence to a 9-5 working day are long gone. But this brave new world comes at a price. Offices are places where we chat and gossip, make friendships, build teams, enjoy lunches out and after-work drinks. They are also the ideal spaces for spontaneous meetings, overheard insights or ad hoc brainstorming sessions.

Today AI is embedded within every aspect of our lives. Most of the things we take for granted like asking Alexa to play our favourite music or unlocking our smartphones with facial recognition, all have an AI layer beneath them. The most difficult problem to solve in the AI world today is understanding human language.

AI has the potential to address the biggest challenges today’s businesses are facing.

CX Realities 2023, is the third in our hugely popular CX Realities series, which takes recent research to give you an expert view on CX in the current market.

What is customer experience (CX)? It is the perception that your customers form of your organization from the interactions they have throughout their journey with you. Think about companies that have given you a great customer experience and how you recommend them to your friends.

Based on surveys of over 400 Contact Centers each year, this white paper looks at the reality of how AI – artificial intelligence – is being used to improve customer contact in organizations.

For years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been touted to handle many issues with customer experience and organisational efficiency. There truly are countless ways to use AI to improve customer service and experience.

Do you want your organisation to have better people and schedule efficiency, greater workforce agility, higher agent and customer satisfaction?

As the world emerges from the pandemic and faces the realities of today’s macroeconomic environment, delivering high quality customer experience has never been more important for companies.

Contact centres are at the forefront of remote-based work and Artificial Intelligence — modernisations that are here to stay. But how does the agent of the future fit in, who are they, and how do we activate them?

This guide sets out how utilities, and their wider supplier ecosystems, can re-connect with customers through the smart use of technology within customer service.

In a difficult economy, successful contact centres will use insight, technology and agile management to solve problems without undermining performance or stifling growth. In this report, we detail the results of our survey, and suggest ways for contact leaders to meet their goals. At its core, the research shows that internal collaboration, better workforce management and top draw technology can square the circle of better service at reduced cost.

The days of using Net Promoter Score as the ultimate in measuring customer loyalty are fading fast. That’s because it gives you only a limited snapshot of a customer’s journey.

In today’s world, your communications infrastructure is more crucial than ever to your ultimate business success. Customers in all sectors expect suppliers to be ultra-responsive, accessible around the clock and able to use their information responsibly to enhance the overall service experience.

You need to create an environment where your staff are empowered and encouraged to give their best every day. Combined with the fact that switching jobs every now and then is becoming the norm, retaining the best people and developing them is quite the challenge...

The travel and hospitality industry experiences an attrition rate of over 80% annually, with early attrition and first-day ghosting significant contributors to these statistics. How can companies throughout the industry curb early attrition while setting their new hires up for long-term success?

This guide outlines how technology investment across customer service can enable local authorities to achieve their objectives to lower costs, strengthen public trust and increase efficiency.

Contact centres are often plagued by disgruntled and demoralised agents. It’s an industry blighted by absenteeism and high attrition rates. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This white paper explores how contact centres can finally become employers of choice, by engaging, empowering and enabling their staff.