Connectors 

I came across one of those at the weekend on Nick Clark of Boston Consulting Group’s Service Matters newsletter on Substack (which is always a good read and I’d recommend you subscribe to).

In this brief article, Nick highlights an often-forgotten factor in the (never ending?) quest to deliver seamless, omnichannel service. Whilst acknowledging that data and platforms are vital, he says we should focus on the ‘connectors’, that is the technologies or techniques that customers use to transition from one contact channel to another. We know they are vitally important. And unless they work well and with minimal friction for consumers they will be neglected, often undermining an organisation’s channel shift ambitions.  

However, mapping their function and availability in customers’ service and support journeys is something that’s often only done late on in an extended programme of work. Or maybe not at all. 

Nick describes the graphic we’ve re-used above as non-exhaustive, but it’s a great starting point and framework to use when seeking to understand how you currently support omnichannel service and how it could work better in the future.  

The matrix is a simple concept, but it allows you to rapidly summarise what needs to be in place to allow your customers to pivot between channels – in a way that works for them (easy and intuitive) and you (transitioning data and context across channels, along with the customer).  

Building that dynamic, customer-led view of how you can help customers shift channels will also help you better serve them within a single channel. As you develop scenarios and journeys, overlaid with an awareness of consumers’ real-world behaviours, you can better design quicker resolution and outcomes. 

So, that’s connectors. A new term and concept to me, that I think I’ll be re-using a lot in the future, thanks to Nick Clark. 

Connections 

And connections? Creating valuable, effective connections is what Customer Contact Panel’s all about:  

• Connections between you and your customers and prospective customers   

• Connections between you and service and technology providers who can elevate your customers’ experience  

• Connections between any of us who are interested in the world of the customer    

Nick Clark has generously shared his insights and when we at CCP have what we think are useful connections, ideas and examples of CX success we’ll do the same. A lot of our challenges are shared and we’re at our best working together to meet them. 

Want to explore how best to help your customers get the most effective service, through the channel and at the time of their choice? 

Then get in touch, we’d love to chat. 

Last week I sat with a former client who said that the average sales cycle for them to sell their SaaS product has increased from 3 to 9 months. This reflects a general trend we have detected in conversation after conversation with both clients and partners. Across the board, we are finding that decisions are slowing, the criteria used within organisations to arrive at decisions are being changed mid-process and apparently settled courses of action get delayed deferred or de-railed by new initiatives.

So, why is this? Does it matter? And if it does, what can you do about?

Expect Delays

Lots of businesses – perhaps especially their customer-facing operations – have gone through a torrid 4 or 5 years of near-constant change. The pandemic, mass home-working, the ‘mass resignation’, surging inflation, supply chain disruption and war, both near and far from home, have all served to create massive disruption and demand rapid responses and decision making. However, this sort of forced decision-making and change is draining, both organisationally and at an individual level.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that organisations are less confident about their abilities to identify the right questions and make the right decisions about them. Uncertainty – fuelled in the UK and US by imminent elections – continues and now feels like a constant for all businesses. At the same time, genuinely profound challenges need to be addressed as organisations face the type of fundamental questions that just weren’t on the corporate agenda a few years ago:

• What will the real impact of AI be – and can we prosper from it?
• Is our business model tenable as we enter further into the climate emergency?
• Will our current customer experience approach and operational model be fit for purpose if we genuinely embrace support people with vulnerabilities?
• How can we exploit automation and granular customer insight if we can’t retain staff and deliver the customer service basics?

Maybe it’s no wonder the capacity and appetite to do so seems to be waning.

Delays may be fatal

Does delay matter? Well, you can argue that profound and existential decisions shouldn’t be rushed. Certainly, an ill-thought-out response to a developing challenge might be costly. But at a point when the pace of competitive challenge is quickening, unnecessary and unplanned delays just sap business confidence, revenue and profitability. Research conducted with senior decision makers showed that 89% believe that organisations taking too long to make decisions risk getting left behind (Orgvue Research).

What’s to be done?

When organisations are becoming slow and indecisive it might seem like there’s nothing individuals – even those in powerful positions – can do. However, there is scope to improve clarity about the decisions to be addressed, the basis on which to make them and your ability to deliver on them:

1) Open things up – rapid decision making won’t help if the range of choices is restricted or inappropriate. We need to understand the underlying challenge – be that a business difficulty or a new opportunity – and then frame the choices to be made. To do so, it may well help to open up that process. Get input from colleagues – at all levels – partners, suppliers and even through observing your rivals. There’s no shame in emulating smart people!

2) Define the decision-making process – once you are confident that you understand where your priorities lie, and the decisions required – about products, people, technology, investments or partnerships – then be very clear about how those decisions will be made. Who will be in the room, what are ranked considerations to be taken into account, what criteria will be used to make decisions – and measure the success of their implementation and effects.

3) Get some help from your friends – you – and your customers – know more about your organisation than anyone else. But getting third-party support and insights from trusted partners can be invaluable in:

• Crystalising your key business challenges (or describing them to a wider internal audience of stakeholders)
• Helping you assess options and possibilities, including the providers of services and technology that will be needed
• Building the assessment and measurement criteria you will need to frame, make and deliver key decisions

Where does Contact Centre Panel fit in?

We work with scores of clients and hundreds of partners every year, helping them make and carry out decisions that are fundamental to their organisational performance. We don’t have all the answers (or questions), but we would love to help understand the frustrations and delays you might be experiencing. Odds are, we have come across a similar scenario or challenge before – or know someone who has.

Let’s have chat and see if we can get things moving again. It could be your best decision of 2024 so far!

As the move towards the electrification of road transport accelerates, so too does the rapid development of the nationwide EV charging infrastructure. However, unlike most newly developing business sectors, the world of electric vehicle charging is taking shape under a significant amount of regulatory guidance and expectation. This doesn’t just extend to planning concerns about the physical appearance and location of chargers, but also how they work and the experience of their customers.

The regulations in place are designed to ensure a whole series of goals including: 99% charge point reliability; physical accessibility and inclusiveness for users; ease of contactless payments; pricing transparency; and the growth of payment roaming providers, which offer the ability to access multiple competing networks from a single app.

“Ultimately, charging your EV should be easier, cheaper and more convenient than refueling a petrol or diesel car, wherever you live” Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

What about customer service?

The Public Charge Point regulations also provide very specific and demanding expectations about how the network operators provide contact centre customer service support. Charge Point Operators (CPOs) are legally required to provide a Helpline service accessible from a freephone number. The helpline must be staffed (presumably by real people, not hallucinatory bots) 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Starting this summer, CPOs will need to provide monthly reports of their customer service helpline performance, both to their regulating department in government, the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV), and the Secretary of State at the Business department.

The reports are detailed, too. They will cover:

• total number of calls the helpline received
• reasons for the helpline calls*
• time taken to resolve the helpline call
• if the issue was not resolved by the reporting date, the reason why

*regulators often seem to think all customer contact is by the phone, still …

Naturally, there are enforcement powers which include a series of fines, including up to £10,000 for Helpline failings. But more significantly, if CPOs fail in their various obligations, they can be hit by a block on any further expansions of their networks.

A massive growth opportunity

The Government is targeting a minimum of 300,000 public electric chargers by 2030 – an almost six-fold increase on the 54,000 there are now. By comparison, there are currently c.8,000 petrol stations in the UK with c.66,000 pumps serving around 37 million internal combustion vehicles.

For CPOs, they need to scale their operations at a pace unlike, say, their predecessors of a generation ago – the mobile phone or internet service providers. They are faced with the same customer experience challenges of supporting consumers as they navigate a new marketplace, taking people from the shock of the new to their escalating expectations of a vitally needed utility service. But now they need to do so with an added layer of regulatory demands and targets – on top of the operational pressures of exponential growth in locations, customers and contacts.

Some CPOs may be attempting to build their own capabilities. They will need world-class technology and experienced customer servicing hands to design a service that not only meets customer expectations, but regulatory obligations too. For those who wish to outsource, they’ll need the right contact centre providers, and should pay particular attention to those with experience in regulated industries.

Either way, there is a huge opportunity to bring existing customer servicing expertise to this market, particularly for those who can demonstrate their ability to design and execute for scale, quickly and reliably.

The road to success

To do so successfully will mean designing a customer service infrastructure that combines:

1. The smart use of data from their connected networks;
2. Seamless advisor insight into the customers’ status and history – and third-party applications, like those for payments and roaming access (giving consumers access to multiple charge point networks);
3. The resources and planning know-how to deliver a reliable but efficient 24/7 service;
4. Skilled front-line advisors trained and willing not just to guide new customers through new processes, but support people at potential times of vulnerability and stress; AND
5. The ability to expand service provision to match the scale of growing networks, while enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of customer service operations, applying insights gained on the ‘front line’.

This is a major undertaking, whether CPOs meet the customer service challenge internally or draw upon varying degrees of expert partner and/or outsourced service provision.

Here at Contact Centre Panel, we know that delivering high quality customer service in a fast growing, regulated market is hard both to plan and execute. It will be essential that CPOs capitalise on the expertise of those who have done it before and recognise some of the pitfalls and the tools and techniques on which to base success.

If you’d like to supercharge the design of your customer servicing environment, or find the right outsourced our technology match, get in touch. We’d love to help.

Just last week, an associate ruefully observed “There’s no future for UK contact centres. They can’t compete on cost; clients won’t pay”. They were specifically referring to outsourced service providers, but the root cause of their – regretful – sense of despair could apply to all sorts of contact centres:

• The cost impacts of an increasingly competitive job market and mandatory increases in living and minimum wages (incidentally, I’m assuming that no-none could object to notoriously under-valued frontline contact centre staff getting better paid, but increased costs do inevitably create commercial pressures);
• The post-Covid shifts in the employment market, the ongoing impacts of the ‘Great Resignation’ and a general raising in employees’ expectations of their roles;  AND
• An often-toxic combination of increased emotional and cognitive loads for frontline staff:
  • Emotional – as they deal with rising levels of customer frustration and rage, compounded by increased financial vulnerability   
  • Cognitive – more channels, more applications, more complex queries, more rules, more oversight

All of which serves to make a contact centre advisor job even less attractive!

As more and more contact centres roles are transitioned to relatively new offshore locations like South Africa, does this quiet ‘second wave of offshoring’ really signal the end of the mainstream, volume UK outsourced contact centre market?  

What’s happening out there? 

Even without a degree of informed insight, nearly all contact centre industry insiders would agree that South Africa – which for many years has been a ‘left field’ location, more talked about than utilised – has in recent years grown massively in importance and profile.   

It’s over 20 years since the first wave of call centre offshoring to India, when brands first embraced the attractions of delivering customer contact activities from overseas. The long-term results were varied; some preserved successfully, some progressively switched India into a predominantly non-voice delivery location, others recanted and repatriated their contact centres (some quietly, some with a great PR fanfare). Lessons were learned – or forgotten – and the world’s a very different place from the early ‘noughties, but it does seem like we are in the midst of a ‘second wave’ of offshoring.    

From CCP’s perspective many clients are choosing to outsource to South Africa, either offshoring their contact centre services for the first time or selecting the location over another other offshore sites used previously.  

Of course, South Africa is far from the only newly emerging contact centre location. Certainly for the big, global BPOs, South Africa already feels a bit ‘last year’ and Egypt is the favourite location. The spread of outsourcing ambitions and capabilities – whether that’s driven by home grown entrepreneurs or global BPOs looking for the next source of untapped, inexpensive talent – across Africa is a fascinating subject. One we may return to in the near future.  

Countries which feature in the growing list of CCP partners’ operational locations range from Bulgaria to Kosovo in Eastern Europe, and destinations even futher afield like Fiji and Suriname. 

It’s not all about cost. But it often is …

There are many reasons and business drivers which can influence an organisation’s decision to outsource its contact centre and customer engagement efforts. These may range from a lack of technical or operational capacity; challenges with staff recruitment and retention; or an acceptance that the organisation’s points of differentiation and value lie elsewhere and that a third party is best placed to deliver contact and support services. But, of course, the decision might be primarily motivated by price. And for a client making the move from an in-house or outsourced UK contact centre to one located in, say, South Africa then they would expect savings in the region of 50%.

Life’s rarely that simple, though. Outsourcing decisions are often propelled by a variety of factors; there are obvious as well as hidden costs in outsourcing, especially at a great physical distance; and simply ‘lifting and shifting’ a contact centre operation will miss opportunities to enhance their customer experience and the tools and processes that deliver them. However, when most businesses are still adjusting to two years of inflation, raised interest rates and fragile levels of confidence, the prospect of delivering unavoidable services for as little as half the cost is compelling. 

Game over for the UK?    

It might look like it, but there are some good reasons to think otherwise. In fact, in some circumstances – or for some outsourced service providers – we could be on the cusp of a UK contract centre renaissance.  

Here are some reasons why:  

• Cost vs Value: business drivers are often cyclical. The same companies that are massively focused on cost and/or headcount reductions today, may be far more focused on customer value next year. Going offshore isn’t synonymous with lower quality interactions, but they can more difficult to sustain from afar, distant from the domestic culture;
• The ‘stability premium’: Business continuity planning isn’t just about unusual weather events, or pandemic flu preparations (remember them!?) nowadays. War, cyber threats, climate change, civil unrest and both formal and informal economic sanctions are of growing importance. Having a contact centre in the UK rather than thousands of miles away isn’t a guaranteed insulation from these factors, but it helps;  
• Complexity: Analysis, gut feeling and research all demonstrate that simple or ‘transactional’ contacts are increasingly rare. Even consumer queries that are ostensibly ‘easy’ are now frequently evidence of profound underlying challenges – either fixable flaws and barriers in how brands interact with customers, or consumers’ own vulnerabilities. Addressing either requires highly skilled, brand-aligned people; AND  
• Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration: As machine learning and Generative AI become integral parts of how brands’ contact centres manage and interact with customers, the need to collaborate :
  • Tech with ops  
  • Proposition with experience  
  • Clients with service providers  
  • Advisors with AI interaction guidance and knowledge solutions will become more important. Doing so with colleagues and partners located nearby, with genuinely shared experiences, may be at a premium

Conclusion

None of these factors are guarantees that the UK outsourced contact centre industry will survive and prosper. However, one thing outsourced service providers are above anything else is resourceful and flexible, so the best of them will a find a way to differentiate and succeed. 

What do you think? Is the UK outsourced contact centre industry doomed – or, not for the first time, has its demise been predicted way too soon?

Let us know. We’d love to hear your thoughts, whether you’re a client or a service provider, whether you’re based in the UK or abroad.

Some people love contracts, others see them as a “document of last resort”.

In the world of customer management / customer experience outsourcing, most people responsible for contracts, both clients and outsource service providers, will aim to be familiar with the service schedules of their contract, but through absorbing the key requirements and mechanisms into their day-to-day working lives. And they will rarely need to reference the original agreement.

Though that isn’t necessarily the way things work. 20 years ago, I had a client who would fly over from Paris once a month with an entire contract printed out, filling a lever arch file crammed into her work bag!

The vast majority of outsourcing contracts follow the same, familiar pattern; three years’ initial term, with the easy potential to extend for a further two. From a buyer’s perspective this offers the reassurance of five years’ clarity about who is going to provide vital customer management services, how and – subject to the vagaries of any cost of living allowance (COLA) measures in the contract to address inflation – confidence over the costs of those services. Equally, this contractual clarity and reassurance allows outsource service providers to better plan, invest and manage their business.

When contracts fail

Historically, this model of contracting tends to fall over when one of two things happen:

1. The parties fall out and that commercially vital relationship collapses (and that’s why clients need to be very circumspect about the outsourced service provider they select in the first place!); AND/OR
2. Changes in the nature of customer demand and behaviour challenge or undermine assumptions in the contract. Especially when transformational metrics and goals have been embedded into a contract, or when service providers are offering a total cost of ownership (TCO) bundled pricing model, a shift in consumer behaviour and their interactions – the volume of contacts, when they are made, using what channels – may serve to potentially undermine the operational and commercial basis of the contract.

Without naming names, those of us in the contact centre and CX industry can think of major outsourced service providers which bet big on their ability to reduce customer contact through things like enhanced self-service tools, but failed due to other, external factors. These drove up unanticipated demand – and the providers ended up with lengthy, loss-making contracts on their hands.

With the best will in the world relationships can always sour and founder, of course. However, we are all capable of learning from experience (at times!) and both seasoned clients and service providers have a broad understanding that there are caveats and limits to what providers can commit to in the face of what Harold Macmillan reputedly referred to as “events, dear boy, events”.

In which case the ‘3 + 2’ model of a well-crafted contract, featuring service schedules that balance a grasp of what’s feasible and achievable with meeting clients’ customer experience ambitions, seems fit for purpose. Doesn’t it? Maybe not.

So, what’s wrong with the old 3 + 2 model?

Here’s what’s wrong – for years the biggest risk and disruption factor for contact centre operations came from unmanageable and unanticipated demand. But now the greatest unpredictability comes from supply; how brands, outsourced service providers and their contact centres go about meeting that demand.

The increasing pace of change is a cliché, but it’s also true.

5 or even 3 years ago who could have accurately foreseen the rise of accessible, highly accurate translation engines that have made the need for multilingual staff in non-voice setting largely redundant in many operations? Today, AI-driven, synthetic voice tools that can deliver quality natural language conversations aren’t yet ready to be operationalised, but by 2026 they may well be. Until recently, accessible technologies that could accurately classify and summarise contacts without any human intervention, or the ability to reliably (and increasingly accurately) present advisors with the sort of guidance and information they need to help with precisely the sort of contact they are handling sounded like the stuff of contact centre managers’ fever dreams. No longer.

It’s hard to tell what the next few years will bring us in terms of time saving and resolution-enhancing technologies, but one thing that’s certain is that committing to a traditional fixed-model outsourced contact centre arrangement now feels like a risky undertaking.

So, what’s the solution?

Should clients do nothing and either:

1. Not outsource key functions when their internal and market analysis says that that’s what’s needed; OR
2. Let outmoded contractual terms roll over, fearful of committing to changes that can’t be undone and will expose them to worse problems down the line?

And if you’re an outsourced services provider faced with a wall of business-draining indecision from current and potential clients, what should you do?

3 points for your consideration

Clients:

1. If you have, or are about to appoint, an outsourced services provider then you’re setting out to build and test a crucial relationship. Ideally, you’re doing so with a provider which will share with you the learnings from them having undertaken similar journeys with a variety of different clients before. If your partner dependably delivers an operational service with an honest and customer-focused approach, then they may well be the right partner for the next stage; exploiting the potential of AI & ML-based technologies (whether the initiative is taken by you as a client, or the provider comes to you with their chosen technologies).
2. We all know it’s hard, but outputs – measures of positive customer experience, total cost of ownership, benchmarked service standards – are the most robust metrics to base your provider’s contractual quality of delivery on. Outsourced service providers increasingly understand that ‘more of the same’ contracts won’t meet the market’s needs.
3. And if your current standards of customer service and delivery are really poor, either through an existing, failing outsourced provider or an in-house solution you can’t fix, then it’s better to settle for a new solution and a commercial arrangement that’s less than fully optimised and future-proofed, but does ensure better experience for you and your customers.

Service Providers:

1. You may have had years of experience in innovating operationally and technically. Now’s the time to think more – or think afresh – about being commercially innovative. You have incredible insight through talking to clients – and their customers – day in and day out.
2. Do you need to re-orientate your business model so that you are better able to cope with the potential impacts and risks of clients being with you for shorter, or less predictable period? Or can your application of technology to your and your clients’ mutual benefit help ensure longer relationships, even with less contractual commitment?
3. For some service providers, more radical change may be required. If you need to identify and nurture genuine transformational partnerships, in place of ‘vanilla’ static service contracts with clients, then that will require a change in proposition, go to market strategy and your selection of potential clients.

What do you think?

What are your thoughts on the future of the ‘3 + 2’ contracting model? Do you think we’re thinking along the right lines, or have we underestimated the enduring value of proven, traditional approach? Whether you’re a client or service provider we’d love to hear what you think.

And if you’re facing challenges designing the right sort of commercial arrangement for outsourcing – either as a client or service provider/BPO – we’re here to help.