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For all the challenges the workforce has faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been a few shifts that are actually good news for employees. In early 2020, millions of employees became full-time remote workers, a first for many of them—and for many contact centers as well. In an industry that has typically been reliant on in-person facilities, nearly 75% of contact centers now allow employees to work from home, with nearly four in 10 saying they will definitely continue agent work-from-home programs for agents and another third say they probably will continue them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed organizations across industries, and perhaps nowhere are we seeing its transformative powers so clearly as in customer relationship management. AI is increasingly enabling organizations to improve customer service, improve customer loyalty and free customer service agents to focus on higher-value tasks. In doing so, AI unlocks a wide range of benefits, from reduced costs and improved employee retention to higher revenue and increased customer satisfaction.

Use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) is on the rise due to an increasing number of cybersecurity attacks, evolving work-from-home policies during the pandemic and new authentication standards. A security enhancement that verifies a user's identity by requiring two or more pieces of evidence when logging into or accessing an account, MFA was the top security technology to be adopted due to COVID-19.

Customer loyalty for Apple is at an all-time high—92%, and that’s no accident. The company is known for its investment in building customer loyalty, and it is reaping the rewards: Apple users are 18% more loyal to the brand than to its biggest Android competitor.

Contact center agents truly work on the front lines of customer service. They are frequently an upset customer’s first point of contact, and that first interaction can set the tone for brand perception over the long term. Ensuring that each of these scenarios is up to the quality your brand needs is crucial both for customer loyalty and the happiness of your agents. Performance management is an important way to meet the needs of both internal and external audiences.

People today are more connected, digitally, than ever before. Digitalization and technological advancements have fueled the adoption of connected devices, which are expected to reach nearly 31 billion units by 2024.

Over a year in to the COVID-19 pandemic, more people are working from home than ever before. Remote work was far from the norm before the pandemic—about 4.7 million U.S. employees, or about 17% of the workforce, worked from home full-time (more than five days a week). By spring of 2021, however, that number had increased to 44%. As experts at McKinsey wrote: “The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place.”