George Bernard Shaw famously said that the US and England were divided by a common language. He would not say the same about contact center agents—CSRs in both geographies are in total agreement about the biggest hurdles to providing good customer service. In an industry-first survey of hundreds of agents, contact center agents worldwide cited the following as their top challenges:

• Finding the right answers to customer questions: 26%
• Different systems or information sources give different answers: 25%
• Hopping from one application or window to another: 20%
• Hard to keep up with all the new information and changes I need to know about: 14%
• Other issues: 15%

Not so surprisingly, the findings mirror the main hurdles faced by consumers as revealed by another survey that Forrester Consulting did for us. Agent pain points simply get passed over to consumers—after all, CX is also a chain just like the manufacturing supply chain.

When we looked for variations across geographies, they were not significant.

The universal solution to the problem?

• Stay away from channel-specific point products when it comes to customer service solutions
• Implement a smart, unified, omnichannel knowledge management (KM) system for fast, accurate, and consistent answers
• Add proven contact center Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to help your agents handle more complex problems or provide value-added advice to customers (and prospective customers) with conversational guidance
• Look for solutions with rich, out-of-the-box features so you don’t waste time and money on customizations for even basic capabilities
• Go with solution providers that offer risk-free KM and AI consumption models that also come with guidance to quick business value offered by domain experts.

Shaw can rest in peace that language differences aside, the hurdles and the solution to excellent customer service are the same for the US and the UK–and in fact, for the rest of the world, according to the same survey!