Why the Contact Centre must transform and catch up with it's customers

Contact centres fight daily rear-guard actions. Like medieval cities under siege, they withstand bombardment by phone and email, before seeing their unprotected integrity breached by customers on social media.

Many customer service functions have failed to keep up with the changing customer journey in recent years. Mobile, tech savvy customers notably within the millennial or Generation Z demographic call only as a last resort. Self-management is everything.

Often, support desks still rely on out-of-date proprietary software, offering only telephony and email support as an option. In this day and age, human interaction is likely only after other, more automated routes have been exhausted. Typically, this is to resolve more complex or crisis-oriented issues.

Maintaining control of the cost-base and a low-cost per productive hour is no longer enough. You have to rapidly evolve to be able to provide the best possible customer experience.

These two objectives can only be achieved with solutions that are multi-channel, offer self-management, streamline and automate workflows and by definition blend machine and human intelligence. 

Scoping and analysis of customer-journeys, business processes and operational capability is imperative if a contact centre’s aim is to provide customised services on a technology platform that can:

• Use omni-channel and digital techniques to increase efficiency
• Provide high-quality, customer-centric experiences across all critical journeys and channels
• Improve customer experience and perception
• Remove internal silos to automate & streamline workflows
• Deliver operational cost-reduction & efficiency

From a human perspective, all of the above has to be underpinned by a frameworks for re-educating and building agents’ skills and capabilities which is not as hard as it seems, as the profile of agents itself is changing. They are often a lot more tech savvy than ‘The Board’.

Change has now become an imperative for the Contact Centre. With over 75% of us seeking omni-channel support, those who fail to deliver this will cease to compete or fulfil an effective role.

Appamondo has delivered solutions into world-class operators in BPO sector,
clients of change management leaders,McKinsey and other consultancies.
In collaboration, it has been able to deliver technologies that address
these issues and have transformed ways of working.