Since the launch of ChatGPT and subsequent proliferation of AI-driven technologies across the customer contact technology landscape, the pace of change has accelerated exponentially. From communication analytics, quality management and agent assist, to replacing IVRs with their omni-channel equivalents and real time translation services, the impact of AI on our industry has almost been as big as the invention of the telephone itself. Not only is this a source of organisational stress, are there implications for outsourcing and contract mechanisms?

While the telephone fundamentally changed human-to-human communication, AI technologies are transforming human-to-machine interactions. And given how we now communicate with each other, that can only mean that change is both permanent and ongoing.

This permanent change is putting increasing stress on organisations to restructure how they equip themselves to communicate with both their customers and their target market, irrespective of the sector they operate in.

We are seeing organisational stress in three areas:

1. Understanding the impact of these changes across the customer and target market demographic
2. Properly evaluating the ability of existing technology platforms to accommodate change and realign to new communication paradigms in the mid to long term
3. Fully understanding the mid to long term commercial impact of bolt on technologies to deliver short term performance and cost reduction gains.

In helping organisations cope with these stress areas we see striking parallels to the changes seen when organisations first began to interact with customers remotely. The evolution which began in the 90s to get more value from data, media and communication spend resulted in specialist operational activity often being outsourced as few organisations had the specialist people, process or technology to support those functions as cost effectively as outsourced providers could.

As customer became core to operations and remote customer management became an operational necessity, organisations began to establish their own capabilities, leveraging existing data management infrastructure to control and drive insight. Customer contact levels boomed, the technology to enable customer contact saw similar growth and our industry was born as more organisations grasped the benefits of controlled and managed remote customer contact.

Considering those parallels, we ask “Should organisations be stressing themselves or does that same customer contact outsourcing industry ‘muscle up’ for this second cycle of permanent change to reduce organisational stress in the shape of Outsourcing 2.0, underpinned by end-to-end AI driven technologies and the accelerated levels of operational insight that provides?”

Observing change in the global customer contact outsourcing market

Outsourcing is a very broad church. Our global network of two hundred plus providers gives us a privileged view of the diversity of the services provided, service delivery and how services are contracted. Whilst industry pricing has generally reduced in real terms over time, the way that service pricing is presented has not really evolved that much, it has not been that complicated, clients have had a choice of:

1. straight hourly rate,
2. the hourly rate with outcome components,
3. outcome with activity components and
4. outcome alone.

Making money has not been that complicated either. As long as the effective revenue per hour outweighed the total known costs per hour, then outsourcers made money.

The outsourcers’ challenge has always been about packaging service and price to be more attractive than the nearest competitor. Of course, that global mind set has led to an incredibly diverse and attractive industry offering, but it is doing little to relieve the level of stress we see in organisations today. Especially as permanent change begins to impact on mid to long term business performance forecasts.

What we see in the global outsource community is the emergence of some clear lines of distinction between service offerings. Principally between those that have the capability (or plan to have the capability) to relieve mid to long term organisational stress and those that don’t. Whilst those customer contact outsourcers that don’t have (or don’t plan to have) this capability to de-stress, continue to be well placed to solve organisations’ immediate and short-term challenges, we have seen some significant levels of technology and skills investment towards an Outsourcing 2.0 capability, amongst those that can.

What we are not seeing enough of is an evolved, Outsourcing 2.0 contracting proposition. One that is equitable for both parties. A simple contract proposition that provides an upside for the technology and skills investment of the outsourcer and in return, long term risk and cost reduction for the client.

Striving to deliver an equitable position to accommodate permanent change

Our view of the customer contact world is that its typically the client that makes the decisions on how they want to automate customer contact to reduce friction and cost in their operations. We also understand that the client may also want to:

1. know more about how changes in customer contact are going to flow through product and service delivery,
2. be able to make active decisions on what those changes mean in terms of risk and profitability,
3. identify service solutions that will de-risk their journey to deliver customer contact at lower cost,
4. deliver value and benefits that justify the time, cost and effort in enabling process change
5. potentially deal with specific customer use cases where they do not have the physical capacity or technical capability,
6. do all this without compromising service delivery in terms of quality and data governance i.e. the regulatory and contracted controls supporting data privacy and data security.

We also recognise that the world of customer contact tech is changing faster than it probably ever has; and it’s hard to tell what the next few years will bring in terms of time saving and service enhancing technologies.

SaaS based technology is easier to deploy, easier to recognise ROI, is already impacting on the flow of low complexity tactical work into the global outsourcing industry. This trend is also evidenced by more work. being delivered via the client’s own technology, enabling them to leverage their existing back-end systems integrations and continue BAU without interrupting the established end to end data flows supporting their existing operational reporting and decision-making processes.

Whilst the outsourcer community is continuing to strive to deliver uncompromising value, to positively impact  service delivery and comply with regulatory and contractual data governance, there is clearly an acknowledgment of the impact that customer contact automation brings to their core market.

Contracting to deliver mid to long term value by de-risking the transition to a permanent change in customer contact

Global outsourcing capability now has a firm dividing line across it. Those that have (or plan to have) the infrastructure and technology to deliver permanent change (2.0) and those that have not.

For those that have (or plan to have), we can see the opportunity for a new type of contracting relationship with clients. A contracting relationship that:

1. de-risks the client from the turbulence of technology change whilst delivering the permanent changes we see in human communication and the impact that has on customer contact service delivery,
2. will enable the outsourcer to deliver appropriate levels of automation without compromising the clients service objectives and targeted cost reduction when expressed as simply as a ‘cost per customer per annum’.

In the context of customer contact, clients find the idea of managing permanent change, de-risking the potential downside of getting that change wrong and doing that at a fixed and reducing cost very attractive. Especially when that contract properly considers how service quality is measured and underpinned as well as being directly linked to cost.

There are then two big variables in the client conversation that are both fundamental to a new contracting proposition.

One is the composition and contracting position of the legacy technology overhead that delivers existing levels of customer contact, especially how that customer engagement technology stack is connected into the ‘back office’ technology of the organisation.

The second is about existing costs. This is the client’s understanding of their current cost of managing their customers. Specifically, how that’s calculated especially in the context of a desire to express that as a ‘cost per customer per annum’.

Recognising the barriers to change

It is easy for us to oversimplify what we see as a new contracting paradigm. But we also recognise that the old contracting models don’t proactively and deliberately reduce the organisational stresses that put mid to long term business performance at risk.

Of course, some business verticals carry significant levels of technology debt. However, unless we explore, and explore deeply, what the possibilities are, then the weight of technology debt will drown organisations and fail as a lifejacket to guarantee ongoing survival.

Unless your technology is able to destress your organisation now, then the same technology stands little chance of keeping you afloat in the mid to long term.

Customer communication and customer contact management has changed permanently and is different from customer contact pre-the explosion in generative AI. This means new risk and new levels of risk for both client and the customer contact outsource communities. Our view is that contracting between the parties needs to change fundamentally.

Outsourcing 2.0 offers a mid to long term view of how both client and service provider can benefit whilst reducing risk on both sides. By looking at contracting differently, both parties can focus on their core strengths and experiences to set and deliver against service goals and commercial objectives. To do that mutually establishing, expressing and agreeing the existing technology stack directly supporting customer engagement and the cost per customer per annum to deliver growth and service objectives.

What next?

What are your thoughts on the future of customer contact outsourcing contracts? Do you think we’re thinking along the right lines, or have we underestimated the complexity of clients’ current position, especially in the context of technology debt? Whether you’re a client or service provider we’d love to hear what you think.

I often think that managing your contact centre performance on a day-to-day basis is like standing on a sandy beach watching the waves come in. Without fail going in, out and always, always, dependent on the weather. Sometimes it’s so monotonous you can drift off in the sun, waves lapping at your feet, then suddenly find you’re floating. Then there are those grey stormy days when it feels like we are going to drown, freezing from head to toe, no wetsuit, now fleecy towel.

So, what should be the first thing in the ‘beach bag’ to make sure we don’t drift off in the sun and don’t freeze our bits off when it gets stormy? The answer – Something that shows us our quality of performance, whatever the weather.  Quality is the one baseline that we can use, whatever the weather. Properly defined, it can be our deckchair, sunshade as well as our wetsuit and fleecy towel. Get ‘quality’ right and there is no sunburn, no more shivering, chilled to the bone.

Technology should be looking at everything we do

In a contact centre technology world now dominated by AI and multiple customer engagement channels, it’s essential that whatever we use to measure quality is looking at everything we do, all of the time. It’s also desirable that whatever we deploy to help us understand and manage quality can help us perform to the best of our potential and make the very most of the people we have at our disposal.

Whether those people are internal or outsourced, it’s our day to day / hour to hour performance that drives us, whatever our resourcing model, however performance is defined. In simple terms, performance is always a multifaceted measure, made up of different time and process-based outcomes delivered to our desktop by the tech’ that enables our everyday customer engagement. Think of those performance outcomes as the ‘what’, then quality is all about the ‘how’. Keeping track of ‘how’ effectively provides us with the tram lines of what is acceptable / not acceptable to the customer and defines the boundaries of what is ‘on brand’ and what is not.

Look at easy-to-deploy applications

Keeping performance ‘on brand’ is something that contact centre managers (inhouse or out of house) have high on their ‘to do’ lists, whatever the beach, whatever the weather. And in our experience, quality is the one area where we see AI driven applications having an immediate benefit. Easy to deploy on a SAS model with usage-based costing models available, these applications can watch every wave, every temperature and air pressure change. Providing you with an early heads up to get off the deck chair and start putting on your wet suite.

Certainly, nailing quality monitoring is the smartest way I can think of as an entry point to deploying an AI strategy. Whilst the landscape may look confused, given that all vendors say the same thing, what we know is that the ‘best in class’ applications are easy to deploy (with ‘out of the box’ CRM / CCaaS integrations) giving you immediate insight and potentially freeing up valuable resources. We have even seen applications providing individual coaching programmes to save additional time and effort for your managers and training teams.

It worked in the 80’s

All of this somehow reminds me of that Bananarama song…. “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”. For those of you who are much too young to remember, Bananarama are an English female pop band who have had success on the pop and dance charts since 1982. Rather than relying on harmony, the band generally sings in unison, as do their background vocalists. Although there have been line-up changes, the group enjoyed most success as a trio made up of lifelong friends. In the 1980s, Bananarama were listed in the Guinness World Records as the all female group with the most chart entries in the world, a record which they still hold.

If quality is a record that your organisation wants to hold, then get in touch. Let us help you with your AI conversation and provide some additional insight on what’s out there in the world of tech’ so you can have a relaxing time on the beach!!!

The automation of customer interactions is as lively a conversation now amongst the CX and contact centre communities as it always has been.

It was in the early 70’s that Theodore George “Ted” Paraskevakos, working at Bell Labs, developed the concept known as “Automated Voice Response” (AVR). His idea involved using touch-tone telephone keypads to interact with computer systems over telephone lines. His work laid the foundations for the development of the simple touch menus and the overlay of voice recognition systems that so many organisations use today as IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and we may finally be getting to the AVR solutions he intended (read on and I’ll tell you why).

What is the relevance of this technology in a world where ‘voice’ is a diminishing part of the CX tool set and contact centre operations you may ask?

It is hard to mention IVR without feeling tension, frustration, even damn right anger, when the technology is deployed badly. This is something we have all experienced to some extent or other, especially when so many of us are time poor and simply want to get the job done in 3 clicks or less. After 50 or so years of evolution and thinking, I do wonder why some organisations are so slow to change. Clearly some large enterprises have invested so much, and integrated so deeply, that a transformation project to address today’s imbalance of voice is seen as ‘super high risk’. Yet where historical investment is lower, there is little excuse not to feel enabled to address the challenges driven by customers growing preference to communicate with their fingers rather than their voices.

Many organisations are held back today because their customer engagement technology is rooted in the world of ‘telephony’. In this world IVR deployment and ‘change’ sits with the IT team and those supporting the ‘telephony’ environment. As a result, ‘change’ takes time and that costs money, the transformation required to take advantage current customer communication preferences mean ‘bolting on’ digital channel capability. ‘Bolting on’ is not a proper term the technical community use. They say “we have an API for that” but in reality, API’s are a very broad church and what the tech’ folk won’t tell you is how much API’s can restrict the flow of data. Which means that any future AI deployment to make sense of the organisations data flows, is looking at a restricted picture, increasing the risk of poor or ineffective decision making. All of which means that there are strong strategic, as well as tactical reasons, to get out of the muddy world of ‘telephony’ and walk boldly into the paved pathways and highways of today’s digital first world. For those that are still apprehensive, ‘telephony’ as Ted Paraskevakos knew it, became a series of 1’s and 0’s years ago.

Voice is now just another digital channel. As a digital channel, IVR simply becomes IR (Interactive Response).

As part of the drag and drop / no code CCaaS applications and ‘customer engagement platforms’, voice channel automation is a big component. New digitally driven contact centre tech’ gives organisations the autonomy and self-determination capability to set up voice driven IR data flows in almost any language, in any ‘voice’ and have those tested and deployed in minutes. Add to that AI (another broad church) and organisations find themselves in a position where the conversation is no longer about the transition from telephony (or voice) to digital, but from a digital organisation to an AI driven digital organisation. Which means that our future conversations will not be about Interactive Response but Intelligent Response…probably something closer to what Ted Paraskevakos actually had in mind when he developed his AVR technology 50 years or so ago!!!

Looking to strike the right balance in terms of your contact centre technology setup? Get in touch, we’d love to chat with you.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been engaged in three specific projects, all with a common thread. To increase efficiency and reduce headcount. All three are well-established, mature contact centre operations with super capable management teams. All three are seeking to refresh the customer engagement component of their technology stack and replace their IVR led customer engagement and contact centre operational applications. Instead, they are identifying omnichannel customer engagement platforms with a ‘digital assistant’ sitting at the front end, from which to drive self-service transformation of the ‘easier’ use cases.

The other key thing that each project has in common is the transition from a ‘voice dominant’ customer engagement environment, to a ‘digital dominant’ environment. Across these three examples, we will see voice reducing from around 60%-70% of contacts, down to 30%-40% over a 36-60 month contract term. Judging from the client coffee table conversations I’m having this is not an uncommon aspiration. The scenario reminded me of the classic children’s story “The Wizard of Oz” – where Dorothy is swept out of her comfort zone, finding herself in a new magical world in which promises can be delivered……sounds familiar?

The scarecrow without a brain, the tin man without a heart and the cowardly lion. All now actors in our contact journey, down the yellow brick road and the promise of fulfilment of our deepest desires.

Yet at its core, “The Wizard of Oz” is a story about self-discovery and the importance of inner strength and courage. Each of the characters that Dorothy meets on her journey is searching for something that they believe will make them whole, but they eventually come to realise that they already possess the qualities they were seeking all along. Dorothy represents our need to feel safe and loved, the scarecrow symbolises our desire for intellectual capability, the pursuit of knowledge and value of critical thinking. The tin man represents the emotional and compassionate aspects of humanity, his journey symbolising the importance of empathy and the emotional connections that make life meaningful. Whilst the lion represents the physical and moral courage that we must all cultivate to overcome our fears and achieve our goals. All equally represented in our own yellow brick road.

So, what of the Wizard? The giver, the transformer and deliverer of our desires. On our own yellow brick road, we too see the wizardry that is technology. The technology sold to us as a powerful and magical thing. Well, to quote the Wizard himself speaking to the scarecrow “I think I’ll miss you most of all.” A quote that ChatGPT tells me “shows that even though the Wizard may not have had real magical powers, he was still able to give hope and support.”

So don’t let your Wicked Witch from the West disrupt and hinder your journey. Have faith, don’t fret and let us share our journeys along our own yellow brick road.

If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, I suggest you read Dave’s article from January’s newsletter or do a quick google search – you won’t be able to miss it. The AI-powered language model is predicted to, and already is, revolutionising industries across the board. But what are its potential implications for the contact centre industry?

With its natural language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can understand and respond to customer queries in a way that closely mimics human interactions. This can lead to faster, more accurate and more efficient support for customers, while also helping businesses save costs by reducing the need for human customer service representatives.

According to a report by Grand View Research, the global contact centre market size was valued at USD 350.4 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.4% from 2021 to 2028. With such a large market size, there is significant potential for ChatGPT to have a major impact on the industry.

One of the biggest advantages of ChatGPT is its ability to handle large volumes of customer queries simultaneously. Traditional contact centres often struggle to keep up with high volumes of requests, leading to long wait times and frustrated customers. With ChatGPT, however, customers can receive immediate support without having to wait in line for a human representative. This can lead to faster resolution times, higher customer satisfaction rates and increased loyalty to the brand.

ChatGPT can also provide 24/7 support to customers, which is especially important in today’s globalised economy where businesses operate across different time zones. This means that customers can receive assistance at any time of the day or night, regardless of their location. This can lead to improved customer experiences, as customers are able to get the support they need when they need it.

In addition to providing faster and more efficient customer support, ChatGPT can also help businesses save costs. According to a study by Accenture, the average cost of a customer service call is between £5 and £7. With ChatGPT, businesses can handle routine queries at a fraction of this cost, as the technology can handle multiple queries simultaneously without the need for human intervention. This can lead to significant cost savings for businesses, as they are able to handle a larger volume of queries with fewer resources.

Furthermore, ChatGPT can provide personalised support to customers by analysing their previous interactions with the business, their purchase history and their preferences. This level of personalisation can help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers, leading to increased customer loyalty and repeat business. A study by Gartner found that by 2025, 80% of customer service interactions will be handled by AI-powered technologies like ChatGPT, which highlights the growing importance of this technology in the industry.

While ChatGPT can handle routine queries, it’s important to note that it’s not a replacement for human customer service representatives. There will still be situations where a human representative is needed to provide more in-depth support or to handle sensitive issues. However, by using ChatGPT to handle routine queries, businesses can free up their human representatives to focus on more complex queries, leading to higher-quality customer support overall.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is a powerful tool that has the potential to transform the contact centre industry. With its ability to handle large volumes of customer queries simultaneously, provide 24/7 support, offer personalised support and save costs, businesses can significantly improve their customer support infrastructure. As ChatGPT continues to evolve and improve, it’s likely that we’ll see more businesses adopting this technology to enhance their customer support operations and improve their bottom line.

Yes, it’s great to see old friends face to face again, but more importantly, it’s energising to see so many great vendors, buyers and influencers interested in what they have to show and tell. Sixty years ago, in his address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, President John F. Kennedy said “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

My observation about the C&CC Expo this year was that it demonstrated the reality of what we knew was possible ten to twenty years ago in terms of the SaaS business model and the benefits of the API driven economy. The show was dominated by the Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) community and those Value-Added Resellers offering their best choice CCaaS partner, combined with an ‘on the ground’ representation of that CCaaS providers marketplace.

What was so striking to me was how much the show layout itself represented the contact centre technology landscape. With the big CCaaS vendors occupying the premium space, the palm trees in the oasis next to the waterholes, and the specialist application vendors nestled closely around them. The more relevant and important the application vendor, the closer they were to the palm trees and the waterholes. The most relevant and interesting to visit were those application vendors that could help make sense of unstructured data. The less they could, the closer they were to the desert at the back of the hall.

Gartner estimates that unstructured data now represents an astounding 80 – 90% of all new enterprise data, and it’s growing 3X faster than structured data. Remembering JFK’s quote, now take a look at this article published in 2019 Insight-driven organisation | Deloitte Insights.

From an industry veteran’s standpoint, it feels like the future has now arrived. The beauty of SaaS delivering the ‘pay as you go’ CCaaS functionality, combined with a structured array of supporting AI driven application vendors, is that they all demonstrate a slightly different way that their product delivers the same solution to the same old set of problems that we’ve struggled with for decades.

What that means for ‘the contact centre tech’ customer’ is a huge amount of choice and a world of opportunity to refresh and upgrade operational functionality. The key point is that the tech’ on show at C&CC Expo this year gives every buyer (big and small) a chance to improve the engagement process (CX & EX) whilst at the same time, make a significant improvement in margin across the short, medium and long term.

If you need help in understanding what contact centre tech’ is the ‘best fit’ to improve your operating margins over the short, medium and long term, then get in touch. We’re here to help.

The journey from paper-based telemarketing teams to Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) driven call centres, through to today’s customer experience platforms, not only demonstrates mankind’s need to access relevant and timely information, but also our business needs to deliver ‘information’ at a lower cost.

Every entity has a customer. Every customer receives information about the product or service that they engage with, often irrespective of whether the individual wants to or not! That paradigm has not changed.

The big change of course is the internet. The ‘cloud’ and the plethora of engagement channels that enables, along with the enablement of tech’, to measure the data flows within them.

This means that ‘information’ is no longer just something we just see on a page, a poster, a screen or dial, it’s something much more accessible and much more about the choices we make, or at least the choices that we think we make.

Thirty years ago, the information we needed to fine tune sales messages was created through carefully managed manual processes. And whilst this still may be true, for some entities more than others, the possibility for tech’ to provide a solution to the ‘process cost’ problem is much more available today than it ever has been.

To put this tech’ revolution into some context, if you have never picked up The Telephone Book by Robert Leiderman, give it a go. It’s a great read and puts into context some great stories of how different organisations approached how to find, get, keep and develop customers using the telephone. The fascinating thing for me is that these stories are just as relevant today as they were 30 years ago when the number of ‘information’ channels limited how we shared information.

Today, with so many customer engagement channels open to us as both business entities and consumers, the ‘information as a service’ not only costs us less in terms of time and effort but is more immediately and easily available through the contact centre technology options that bombard our searches and our inbox. Whilst the last three decades have given us more technology choices, they have also bought us a ‘complexity of offer’.

Historically contact centre tech’ vendors were very simply categorised as voice, process or efficiency based. Today technology categorisation, even to the well initiated feels more complex. With a plethora of other customer engagement channel choices, automation choices and the use of true AI monitoring all of the customer engagement and back end data flows, technology selection feels more daunting, when really it should be simpler.

To paraphrase Leiderman, maybe simplicity comes by thinking of our tech’ requirements being driven by how to find, get, keep and develop customers using data. In our API driven economy, that feels to me like a much easier ask.

If you need help in framing your contact centre tech conversation, then please get in touch.

Everyone wants positive growth. Perhaps not our waistband, but certainly everything else. It’s how capitalism works. Positive growth is a simple concept. Increase the number of new customer transactions, increase the frequency of existing customer transactions or increase the average transaction value. Deliver any one of those and growth is linear. Deliver all three and growth is exponential.

In the contact centre tech’ space we see lots of solution providers targeting firms that want to increase growth, whilst at the same time reducing cost to serve. They offer us great case studies of how they have increased operational efficiency, seamlessly delivered new customer communication channels and/or augmented people assets through digital assistants or BOTs to drive automation. This conversation is not about that. This conversation is about something far more basic and far more fundamental to the transaction process. Payments.

In my experience, when business managers think of contact centre payments, two things come to mind. One is taking payment cards over the phone. The second is the complexity of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Generally, the conversation ends abruptly when it comes to the PCI DSS. Usually, the discussion is never really that interesting and is likely to cost money. Plus people believe the PCI DSS to be so complex when it comes to contact centres, that it feels easier to pay the monthly non-compliance fines and increased transaction charges.

Well folks, there is another way to think about it and here is why. Just like we think of aligning our contact centre tech to engage with the customer – less friction, less cost etc, so we should think about payments. We know our customer communication strategy should align with how our customers want to engage with us, so why not our ability to take payments?

The point is that contact centre payments are just like contact centre everything else, they need to support how customers want to interact with us. And what does that mean in the context of growth. Well, the answer to that is simple. Just think about how you can take more payments from more customers more easily, at less risk and at less cost. Have a payments strategy and align it with how customers generally want to pay and enable that within all the communication channels you use to engage with customers.

Oh, and the PCI DSS thing? Just come and ask and we’ll simplify that whole thing for you.

Am I fooling myself that nature will prevail or am I simply being lazy in not following the weekly routine of starting the lawnmower, begrudgingly filling it with petrol and pushing it up and down this green space telling myself it’s good exercise!?

I should succeed. Information is available, I have the vision and help is at hand. My daughter, whose family nickname by the way is Flower, works for the local Wildlife Trust. My wife, an abstract landscape artist, whose appreciation of colour is a gift she shares openly in her abundance of work. My options are numerous, and the more I’m asked to pay, the less it appears, my risk of failure.  Reading through the links that appear readily when I open the browser on my phone, I’m invited to spend thousands to take away my pain of failure. I could scrape up the field and returf with carefully selected grasses and wildflower seeds to match my soil type. Or maybe the lesser cost option of adding a layer of soil impregnated with appropriate seeds, again matched to my home ground.

Apparently, the problem I’ve failed to overcome in establishing my small contribution to biodiversity, is that wildflower seeds, however many times I scatter them over the autumn field, stand little chance of germination because they fail to compete against the established and dominant grasses. The most ecologically effective approach to solving this problem is to mow, scarify aggressively and plant yellow rattle, which suppresses the grasses and leaves space for wildflowers to grow.

So, when you mistakenly believe your budget is actually your business plan and you set forth with the best intentions to reduce your operating costs through automation, deploying BOTs where once there were voices, have a thought about my attempts at growing a wildflower meadow. Perhaps take the time to understand the full dynamics and nature of the ground you are seeding. Have a thought about taking the strategic long term aims, not tactical fixes. Think through your options of delighting your customers without necessarily spending thousands pulling up the old and laying down the new. Embrace the available help from familiar people who have proven experts in helping others and embrace the nature of what you already do to ensure that the new can grow and flourish.

Whatever you do, don’t simply let the grass grow and expect to get a wildflower meadow.

The summer break gives us time to reflect on the year to date. It’s always great to start with the successes and then the failures, or ‘opportunities’ as we are meant to label them. One such ‘opportunity’ that’s worth avoiding is that of ‘buyer’s remorse’, that sick feeling that starts in your stomach and rises through your chest, plants itself in your head and from that point on, haunts the conversation as soon as the subject matter is discussed.

Nothing presents itself better in this scenario than buying contact centre tech’. Why? Well, the answer is very simple and it’s all about context. That context is that buying anything, especially high value, and specifically, those that are complex and have multiple stakeholders, need a salesperson to sell them and contact centre tech’ is one of those things.

The scenarios witnessed all have one thing in common. The salesperson won. It’s like watching a gladiator against an unarmed soldier and in some cases, I’ve been reminded of that series of films that involved Predator and Alien, which perhaps reveals how long I’ve been around making these types of observations.

In all these procurement journeys, it was simply a case of one party going into play with more weapons, more skills and more technique than their combatant.

In that famous Monty Python sketch, ‘surprise’ is always an advantage. Although, as we know the element of surprise comes through knowledge and planning. Then comes the relationship development, even some personal social media interaction to cement the ‘advantage position’.

Tools? Well again, we all know what they are, but often fail to remember that salespeople these days are highly trained professionals who are targeted to win against people they have targeted to sell to.

Once the ‘trust position’ is established, out comes the ‘glitter and gold’ and of course, that’s all presented well to solve all the problems that the combatant has been sharing as the ‘relationship’ has been developing. Not that anything needs to have been mentioned. Typically, the professional sales team’s ‘intelligence unit’ have weaponry that gathers everything on the internet that your organisation has been putting out there, or even just checking something obvious like your company’s Trust Pilot scores and social media sites. These all are designed to reduce the risk of the sale not completing and the glitter and gold are deposited in the buyer’s jewellery box.

So, maybe take some armour and weapons of your own, make the tech’ purchasing journey an even contest and make sure what you end up buying is the gold you wanted.