Business Systems (UK) Ltd’s Scott Budding takes a look at four key transformation drivers your contact centre needs to prepare for…
The age of transformation
Call centres like other areas of business need to undergo a transformation to break down silos, unify disparate data and provide a far more personalised service that today’s digital customers demand.
Digital transformation extending right into the back office will be high on the agenda for 2020. The aim is to work together in the front and back office, so teams share responsibilities for a more streamlined customer experience.
The blending trend continues
Blending has been talked about a lot over the past twelve months and the debate will continue into 2020. The move to blended operations is being advocated by analyst firms such as Gartner, who recommend that the front office, which includes areas such as customer loyalty programmes and feedback channels, should be more tightly integrated with the back office. This ensures that customer service and productivity and efficiency levels do not slip, while tightly controlling costs.
At the same time, a more digital back office can simultaneously reduce a consumer engagement budget and improve the customer experience.
Automation in the spotlight
Automating the front and back office is now becoming a reality. There has been much energy spent on automating processes from end to end, which has often been too ambitious. So organisations are now shifting to a step by step way approach. They are looking at automating activities and steps within processes, rather than trying to automate the entire workflow in one ‘big bang’.
Many of the big projects were failing because the challenge was just too large. Automation technology, however, has become far more robust and more appealing with more organisations looking to adopt it in 2020.
In addition, consumers are more accustomed to automaton in their everyday lives and expect issues to be resolved quickly. It is paramount that call centres transform in order to keep pace with changing consumer needs in a digital economy.
Employee well-being will be underscored
Employees and their well-being are an emerging area of focus. This includes empowering agents to have more say on when their time is being scheduled, for example, to find the right work-life balance.
Agents play a critical role in any contact centre’s success. And it is no surprise that agents well-being is playing an important part in how well a contact centre performs. Retaining millennials in the workplace, for example, is difficult. Contact centres need to ensure they are attractive and flexible enough to attract and retain talent otherwise they are in danger of losing employees to other centres that do make well-being a priority. It is essential that management understand the driving market factors in their workforce and respond to agents’ needs – so they can better respond to the customer.
The contact centre industry isn’t known for its agility when it comes to transformation. But, organisations are now actively seeking out technology to support digitisation, blending and flexible workforce management.
Whether it is integrating new technologies or instigating new ways of thinking to offer the best possible outcome to customers, 2020 promises to be an exciting year.
Scott Budding is the Workforce & Process Optimisation Manager at Business Systems (UK) Ltd, a specialist in providing call recording and workforce optimisation solutions.