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Bots have officially gone mainstream. Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) people surveyed recently said they have interacted with a bot in the past 12 months, and 40% of millennials report chatting with bots on a daily basis, according to Forbes.

Imagine trying to settle a new continent or explore a new planet – so much would be unfamiliar, including unmapped areas, suspecting locals, and not even knowing what you don’t know. Now, think of your contact center agent, similarly sent off into the new era of digital everything – still trying to deliver exceptional customer service, but under pressure, a lone pioneer in a new territory, and challenged in unprecedented ways by the change in culture and surroundings.

Customer self-service capabilities have been helping manage workload in contact centers for decades. IVRs have been automating self-service since the 1970s. Improvements in search engines have given customers direct access to knowledge base systems to conduct their own troubleshooting and problem-solving. These and other tools have been running alongside the contact center workforce for many years, giving the contact center a much-needed reprieve in headcount requirements. In today’s world, the newest self-service gadget is the “bot”.

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.

Humans are naturally competitive. If you look around society, you’ll see the echoes of competitive behavior everywhere. But it’s not always a productive use of our energy. Competition is one of those things that can bring out the best in us and the worst in us, depending on the context and what it’s trying to achieve.

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.

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.”