What’s next? More of the same, that’s what! As we all know, that’s the nature of the regime; it’s here for keeps.
We know from the FCA’s reviews of firms’ mandatory Consumer Duty Board Reports that their initial assessment of the industry’s response to the requirements of Consumer Duty has been broadly “ok for starters, but you can try harder”!
The FCA’s update on its review of the Consumer Duty rules promised some simplification and removal of some arguably unnecessary, prescriptive requirements (in line with the Treasury’s ‘cut red tape’ agenda), but the range and depth of the permanent change in the treatment of customers that the FCA wants to see will remain.
This is to be expected and no doubt most firms are focused on the FCA’s specific callouts for Board Report improvements such as:
- Improving the quality of data – and the insights derived from it
- More fully reflecting the needs of different consumer cohorts, especially those with vulnerabilities
- Ensuring that boards are challenging – and seen to be challenging – the business to meet the Consumer Duty’s requirements
- Clarity on the timescale, action owners and data to drive planned improvements
But one further area for improvement will be particularly relevant to colleagues in the customer experience and/or contact centre space – “Comprehensive view across distribution chains”.
Yanking the chains
The FCA has long recognised the importance – and potential for the risk of service and experience failure – in distribution and supply chains. Many financial services organisations will have already had to review their supply chains to meet the FCA’s expectations around Operational Resilience.
Meeting the outsourced, sub-contracted and third-party challenge
In the context of Consumer Duty, though, the focus needs to be less on the dangers of total failure than the more subtle risks of poor visibility and exchange of information, and inconsistent consumer treatment and experience.
The way in which financial products and services are sold, delivered and supported can often involve multiple partners in the supply chain – covering sales, payments, customer service, claims, redemptions and other functions.
At nearly every point of the customer journey the way in which consumers are supported and interacted with, both through human-to-human dialogue and automated channels, creates a Consumer Duty risk.
Outsourced and sub-contracted relationships need to be managed to ensure that the standards of consumer data and insight; advisor training and empowerment; online and automated information and decision making; consumer recognition; fairness; and effective compliant recognition and resolution; are all delivered as well as they are in-house. To do so will require a blend of initiatives and efforts, including:
- Contracts and service–schedules; contractual management Information and KPIs
- Data and information security assurance, including payments (and the news that Marks & Spencer’s recent £300m cyber-attack is being blamed on a 3rd party supplier’s error highlights the criticality of this area)
- The quality assurance and provision of guidance and information to both customers and advisors
- The ability to share and identify customer profiles and features (especially vulnerability factors)
- Advisor training and coaching
- The provision of self-serve and assisted support tools and concessionary measures
(and all of these are an ongoing commitment, not just a ‘one time fix’)
In Summary
Managing complex customer supply chains can be tricky at the best of times, but adding in a raft of demanding regulatory expectations and requirements makes it more difficult still.
Have you already met this challenge or are you still assessing how to better go about it? Let us know. Get in touch, we’d love to chat.
Identifying and supporting vulnerable customers – such as those experiencing financial difficulties, health issues, or emotional distress – is crucial for ethical, compliant and effective service delivery.
While the FCA has long taken a leading role in this space, other regulators such as Ofcom and Ofgem have also required vulnerability protections to be in place, with the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC), which came into effect on 6 April 2025, also widening the concept of vulnerable customers.
With thresholds higher than ever, the risks of not identifying vulnerable customers can be significant. Fines can now be imposed without a court order and at eye-watering levels, with reputational risk a compounding facto, not to mention the impact on vulnerable individuals themselves.
What’s more, with the divergence between UK and EU law, any cross-border businesses need to be even more on their toes in different jurisdictions.
What is the AI doing to detect vulnerability?
With the preceding three use cases essentially laying the groundwork for this kind of analysis and management, AI can identify signs of vulnerability by analysing speech patterns, language cues, and emotional indicators.
Key benefits: Categorisation and risk scoring
Vulnerability is a spectrum, and customers can move in and out of vulnerable states or between risk factors. Detecting this manually, however, is fraught with difficulty.
First, different people have different – and subjective – views on whether a customer may be indicating a vulnerability factor.
Second, the cues can be subtle and therefore challenging to pick up, especially when an agent – as a normal part of their job – is multi-tasking across multiple screens, taking notes and trying to hold a conversation at the same time.
But the AI is far less likely to miss those cues, because it isn’t distracted, isn’t having a bad or busy day, and doesn’t have empathy as an emotion. Any AI empathy is trained in data, and consequently consistently applied.
Record accuracy
As with use case 1, the use of AI enhances note taking and record-keeping by transcribing and summarising the call automatically. This avoids any temptation to rush the process, and risk non-compliance, while allowing the agent to focus solely on the customer’s needs.
Compliance alerts
While you could employ this kind of analysis in-flight, where prevention is almost always more desirable than cure, even a post-call analysis allows for flagging of potentially vulnerable customers and pro-active outbound or other management of that customer. retrospectively, and still gain some of the benefit, the nature of the regulatory and legal environment makes a real-time approach more desirable, with a prevention rather than cure approach.
Real-time vulnerability detection
The ultimate deployment of real-time detection during a call allows agents to adjust their approach on the fly. And for a true ‘belt and braces’ approach, if a risk score is exceeded, this can be flagged as a ‘red alert’ to the agent, very clearly instructing them not to sell, to do a welfare check, or provide relevant support information.
All of which not only manages the risk to individuals and the business, but empowers agents with the confidence to handle sensitive situations effectively and retains consumer trust through a commitment to their wellbeing that can also foster loyalty.
Implementation Considerations
Again, systems integration and data privacy are key factors in implementation, especially around matters of data usage and consent. As is training and embedding belief in the AI.
But where in other use cases it may be that the cost (or perceived cost) and complexity (or perceived complexity) of implementation of the AI project make the decision more difficult, in this instance, the potential of the AI is less about an ROI against cost than it is about ROI against the potential cost of those eye-watering fines if getting it wrong.
Measuring Success
Here, measurement may be a little trickier, depending upon how well you are able to understand the current baseline. Consider that manual QA is based on only 1-2% of calls, there could be whole swathes of risk going undetected.
The ideal situation is that there is nothing to measure. No issues, no incidents.
However, you can look at measures such as customer feedback from vulnerable customers, the numbers of interventions such as welfare or information provided, and adherence to regulations, particularly if using retrospectively rather than real time.
But the real benefits come from what doesn’t happen, rather than what does. In summary, they are:
- More frequent and consistent identification of customer vulnerability
- More accurate records
- More confidence in your compliance
- Less perceived risk within the business
Using AI to identify vulnerable customers enables contact centres not only to improve on consumer duty and meet the right ethical standards with empathetic and responsible service, it hugely decreases the risk of the worst possible outcome (from a business viability perspective) of an unexpected knock on the door from the regulator and/or widespread bad press.
To find out more about how CCP can help you make the right technology choices, read more here or get in touch.
This series of articles is drawn from our webinar with Jimmy Hosang, CEO and co-founder at Mojo CX. We explored seven key use cases for AI in contact centres, starting from the easiest productivity gains to value generating applications. You can find a summary of all seven use cases here, or watch the webinar in full here.
Moving up the value chain of AI use cases, consistent and effective agent coaching is a vital to the performance of contact centres. From areas that are critical to risk management, such as in regulatory compliance, or value-driving in improving customer experience and brand perception.
Traditionally, coaching relies on the same small samples and manual evaluations as QA (per use case 2), which inevitably means observations are sporadic and opportunities for improvement missed.
What is the AI doing in Auto Coaching?
Auto Coaching harnesses artificial intelligence to analyse agent interactions. It ‘listens’ to the conversation to identify areas of strength and opportunities for development. These data-driven insights then inform an AI-generated, individual agent coaching plan. Providing their coach with the tools to cater to individual agent needs and foster continuous improvement.
Key benefits: Efficiency
When you consider that 60-80% of a team leaders’ time is spent gathering information (Mojo time and motion studies) from the likes of Excel or Power BI to knit together a story of performance – to bring together call data, performance stats and behavioural insights into one place – and deliver coaching sessions, it’s easy to see the benefit of AI taking on this task.
Not just in efficiency, where it is possible to shift from a 1:12 or 1:15 manager to agent ratio to closer to 1:18 without losing effectiveness, but increasing team leader job satisfaction. Where they feel that more of the work they do is making a difference. As with previous use cases, how you take this efficiency benefit is a choice. Either in headcount reduction, or in delivering more coaching – which in turn drives customer experience improvement, or redeploying resources to more strategic tasks elsewhere.
Coaching quality and consistency
What’s more, each coaching conversation will itself improve in quality, because the feedback is based on and prioritised by a much greater data sample both for individual agents and the agent population as a whole. It also ensures agents receive consistency in their feedback, not just in one-to-one manager/agent relationships, but again all managers across the whole contact centre are delivering the same messages on the same coaching points to improve the quality of interactions overall. Which means opportunities are no longer missed, and the opportunity cost diminishes, while also improving customer experience.
An example of this, particularly when integrated with other speech analytics and the QA scorecard of use case 2, could be for offshore contact centres, where the agents speak the language of their customers, but colloquialisms, dialect, accent, vocabulary, fluency, speech pacing or cultural differences result in misunderstandings or frustrations.
Personalised rapid development
With AI in the mix, you no longer need to wait to deliver coaching on specific issues. Or hope that you’ve picked up the key ones from the samples you have when reviewing manually, because the AI is dedicated to finding them on a daily basis. Meaning coaching points for individual agents can also be delivered in real-time, or near-real time depending upon implementation.
The consequence of this targeted, personalised rapid development is that team leaders are able to have the right coaching conversation in the right moment – or even that the agent can ‘self-coach’. Coaching becomes both more efficient and more effective. Agents develop more rapidly, picking up development points as they occur, not days later when it’s easier to have forgotten it (or perpetuated bad habits) and in bite sized pieces, making the feedback more digestible and memorable. Their job satisfaction is improved though faster progression and the business wins through better customer service, better selling or more impactful risk management.
Automated role play
A further step in the development of this use case is the potential for AI to synthesise customer calls for training at varying levels of complexity. Either to pick up systemic issues within the whole operation, or to pick up specific agent needs on the job, or as part of the grad bay, which can then itself also be automated in the analysis and scoring of agent responses, per use case 2.
Here we see real driving both efficiency and effectiveness throughout the contact centre. And again, by providing agents with confidence in a safe environment, other KPIs such as attrition can be positively impacted.
Implementation Considerations
As with all other AI use cases, integrations and data privacy are key considerations. But in this case, it’s important to consider your accuracy thresholds for the AI, and how you will test for accuracy so that team leaders are confident in the AI’s ability to deliver. Furthermore, you will need to educate team leaders and agents on how to use AI-generated feedback. Always think ‘Human-in-the-loop’ (HITL) to ensure coaching is still accompanied by all of the empathy necessary to make it successful.
Measuring Success
For this use case, consider monitoring agent metrics such as first-contact resolution, number of coaching points and CSAT as a measure of coaching effectiveness on a one-to-one basis, measures of coaching preparation time or manager/agent ratios as measures of effectiveness. Then more broadly consider agent retention rates as a measure of higher satisfaction and reduced turnover.
In summary, the key benefits are:
• Significant reduction of the 60-80% of time leader spent preparing coaching
• Shift of manager/agent ratio from c. 1:12 to 1:18
• Higher job satisfaction and reduced attrition among agents
• Higher job satisfaction among team leaders
• Improved CSAT and brand perceptions as service improves across the board
As we move up the value-chain, the AI does get more difficult to implement. However the payoff also tends to get bigger too. Auto Coaching can be considered a strategic investment in agent development, to foster a culture of continuous improvement, that leads to enhanced performance and customer satisfaction.
To find out more about how CCP can help you make the right technology choices, read more here or get in touch.
This series of articles is drawn from our webinar with Jimmy Hosang, CEO and co-founder at Mojo CX. We explored seven key use cases for AI in contact centres, starting from the easiest productivity gains to value generating applications. You can find a summary of all seven use cases here, or watch the webinar in full here.
Quality assurance (QA) is a staple of every contact centre, more so where compliance and regulation demand it. Traditionally, manual QA reviews are concerned with the customer interaction itself, are labour-intensive and typically cover only 1-2% of calls.
While manual QA will pick up some training points, through a lack of comprehensive coverage, it often misses systemic issues that haven’t become immediately obvious elsewhere in the organisation but that could be found buried in call analysis.
What is the AI doing in Auto QA?
Auto QA uses artificial intelligence to automate the evaluation of both customer interactions through transcription (remember use case 1 – autowrap) and sentiment analysis, and what the agent did on systems.
Let’s examine the benefits.
Key benefits: Comprehensive coverage
With AI, it is possible to cover 100% of interactions; to fully assess agent performance consistently and at scale across all interactions and all areas of the QA scorecard, and send alerts straight to a team leader’s desktop.
Resource optimisation
With manual QA, you typically see around a 1:30 or 1:50 ratio of manual QA people to agents. But with Auto QA, you can expect around a 75% reduction in that overhead. Which is significant when working on fine margins, either in headcount reduction, or redirecting those resources to transformation or speech analysis tasks as opposed to data gathering.
Consistent evaluations
As with any human task, while we may believe all QA people are using their scorecard and delivering in the same way, even with calibration sessions and financial incentives, the chances of that being the case are slim; you may already know this from those calibration sessions. Indeed, the interpretation of the calibration itself may be flawed – for example, two different people may have very different takes on what constitutes empathy.
So while an AI scorecard evaluation of a voice interaction may, for example, only be 80% accurate to begin with, it is consistently 80% accurate, as opposed to the potential for human analysis to vary significantly and most likely sit at a lower accuracy figure of around 65%. Meaning more calls are scored at greater accuracy overall.
Real-time feedback
Finally, the benefits of real-time feedback while softer, are easy to understand. And completely measurable via the scorecard.
First, immediately picking up training points allows the agent to implement improvements on the very next interaction.
And second, for an agent taking hundreds of calls a day, picking up a training point even a few hours after the call occurred – especially if the interaction reason or resolution is atypical – makes it harder for the improvement points to stick, even with the benefit of the call to hand.
Implementation considerations
Aside from systems integrations, data privacy and compliance – and instead focusing more on the vagaries, of AI – accuracy (or lack of it) immediately translates through to an impact on human resources, where a less accurate AI could result in wasting resources on issues that aren’t issues.
Which is why it is always desirable to ensure there are humans in the loop (HITL), both in training, developing and refining the AI models, or in the process of checking its conclusions before delivering feedback.
With a combination of human review and machine learning improvements, the 80% accuracy figure can be improved to 85-90% accuracy in around four weeks, at which point you can consider pointing the human resources to different tasks. For systems interactions, including chat, you would expect greater accuracy from the AI from the outset, as it immediately has controlled data to assess.
If you can achieve 95-100% accuracy, per Mojo CX’s claims, then you can be confident human resources are targeted to where they are needed most. It may even be that you are willing to accept a lower rate of accuracy if the QA benefits outweigh the wastage. This is a decision unique to your business. And so as with use case 1, it’s important to understand the true baseline that the AI is improving upon.
Elsewhere, you may choose not to assess 100% of calls for processing and ESG reasons. These are all tolerances and optimisations that you can test and set to deliver against competing KPIs.
Measuring Auto QA success
For any AI implementation, it’s important to measure its success as this will build the case for future implementations. Whether that’s headcount, resource allocation QA KPIs or any of the many other contact centre KPIs.
In summary, the benefits are:
· 75% reduction in QA processing time
· 50-100 x increase in evaluated interactions
· 15-25% increase in evaluation accuracy and consistency
· Greater and faster improvement in agent performance and CSAT
While undoubtedly a little more complex to implement than use case 1, implementing Auto QA builds on those foundations by making use of call transcription and taking it to the next level.
To find out more about how CCP can help you make the right technology choices, read more here or get in touch.
This series of articles is drawn from our webinar with Jimmy Hosang, CEO and co-founder at Mojo CX. We explored seven key use cases for AI in contact centres, starting from the easiest productivity gains to value generating applications. You can find a summary of all seven use cases here, or watch the webinar in full here.
Summarising calls takes time – anywhere from 10-30% of the call. And agents are almost always under pressure to get the task completed in as little time as is humanly possible to meet AHT and wait targets. This often translates to errors or even missing data. Which not only makes it hard for future agents to follow the story, it can be a regulatory challenge too.
AI-driven autowrap and summarisation tools are helping to alleviate this burden by automating the process, allowing businesses to cut handling times and improve CRM accuracy. According to Jimmy, it’s one of the easiest applications of AI a contact centre can implement.
What is the AI doing in autowrap?
Autowrap and summarisation technology uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to transcribe customer calls in real time. As calls progress, key details such as issues raised, resolutions, and next steps are captured automatically. This eliminates the need for agents to manually document call details, both reducing errors and freeing up time for more customer-centric tasks.
Key Benefits: Time and Cost Savings
By reducing the time spent on manual transcription, businesses can lower wrap times by 50%, which translates to reducing handling times by 5-15%. For a contact centre with 200 agents, taking the mid-point of 10%, this could result in a reduction of up to 20 FTEs, and delivering a 2-3X ROI from day one.
How you take this benefit is then your choice:
a) A productivity gain, even through natural attrition
b) A service improvement by reducing wait times or improving service, with longer call times to allow for better first contact resolution
c) Reinvest in more value driving AI use cases to build maturity
Call Summary Accuracy
With manual transcription, there is always the risk of errors or omissions. AI-driven solutions eliminate these risks by automatically capturing the most relevant data from each conversation, improving both the consistency and quality of CRM records.
Increased accuracy has a number of benefits, whether you run a regulated business or not. First is in future contacts, whether you met a first contact resolution goal or not. Any future calls where a customer refers to a previous call – and reasonably expects there to be some level of ‘corporate memory’ – can be shortened by avoid any lengthy re-explanations of what has gone before. Not only does this provide a future productivity gain, it makes for a far better customer experience too. So even at use case 1, we are already facilitating value generation through slick customer processes that avoid typical customer frustrations, as well as productivity.
What’s more, the data is clean, reliable and available for future analysis and QA. Look out for an article on use case 2, Auto QA, for more on that subject.
When building a business case, these are important considerations; it’s important to remember that your baseline probably isn’t perfection. And so your quality uplift may be greater than you have otherwise anticipated.
Easy Integration: No Overhaul Required
While it is undeniably desirable to integrate Autowrap technology into CRM or policy admin systems, it’s not a pre-requisite to start making these gains. An agent – dubbed the ultimate API in our recent whitepaper– can easily check through the summary, make any necessary amendments if you require it (your benchmark of what is good enough will depend on your business) and copy and paste it in. They’re already used to connecting disparate systems and will be working where you want to capture it anyway.
This means that businesses can buck the trend of AI project failure and quickly adopt the technology with minimal disruption to existing workflows. Once the ‘short, sharp’ solution is working, of course you can consider and implement the deep integrations to automate the task, but you will be most of the way there without it.
Enhancing Agent Experience and Customer Outcomes
As alluded to earlier, the benefits aren’t just about reducing operational costs—they also enhance both the agent and customer experience. By automating mundane, and often poorly executed tasks like call transcription, agents are free to focus on more valuable work, such as problem-solving and building customer relationships.
This not only boosts job satisfaction – which in itself may then also translate to tenure, sickness and recruitment gains – it also contributes to higher-quality customer interactions. Look out for use case 5, ‘Agent Assist’ for more on this topic.
Measuring Success
For any AI implementation, it’s important to measure its success as this will build the case for future implementations. Whether that’s headcount, resource allocation or the gamut of other contact centre KPIs.
In summary, the benefits are:
1. Immediate productivity gains of c. 10% of agent all handling time
2. Improved accuracy of note taking
3. Customer satisfaction gains from better corporate memory and more attentive agents
4. More time available for valuable conversations
5. Employee satisfaction gains – happier agents, longer tenures, less sickness, reduced recruitment
6. Regulatory compliance improvements
7. Easy and scalable implementation to shorten implementation timescales and increase AI success
8. Ability to re-invest gains in building AI maturity
Ultimately, accurate (enough) autowrap is an obvious win in any contact centre.
To find out more about how CCP can help you make the right technology choices, read more here or get in touch.
This series of articles is drawn from our webinar with Jimmy Hosang, CEO and co-founder at Mojo CX. We explored seven key use cases for AI in contact centres, starting from the easiest productivity gains to value generating applications. You can find a summary of all seven use cases here, or watch the webinar in full here.
AI in the contact centre is no longer a question of if, but where to begin. In our recent webinar with Jimmy Hosang, CEO and Co-founder of Mojo CX, we explored seven practical, high-impact AI use cases that are already delivering returns in real-world operations. From automating wrap-up notes to exploring full voice AI, the conversation cut through the hype to focus on what’s truly working – and what’s coming next.
From productivity savings – and easy wins – to value generation, here we summarise each of the seven use cases, their benefits, pitfalls, and what it takes to make them work.
1. Autowrap / Call Summarisation
This is one of the most immediate and measurable wins for AI – and it’s relevant to every contact centre, whether procedural or regulatory. With AI transcribing and summarising calls, wrap time is reduced by 50% and average handling times by 5–15%. In a 200-seat contact centre, at 10%, that’s equivalent to freeing up 20 full-time agents.
It’s an easy sell for operations leaders: the 2-3X ROI is immediate, the data is clean (and doesn’t need complex integrations, a simple copy/paste will do to start), and the impact on agent workload is obvious. What you do with the benefit is up to you; save the 20 FTE through natural attrition, reduce wait times, improve service. Less typing, less admin, more time for real conversations.
2. Auto QA (Quality Assurance)
Manual QA processes typically only cover 1-2% of calls. With AI-powered auto QA, every conversation can be transcribed and assessed, increasing both coverage and scorecard accuracy, with the potential to reduce QA overhead by 75%. Once the model reaches high accuracy (which can be achieved in four weeks or less), it enables a rethinking of QA resourcing. Where teams can reinvest those hours into value-adding activities like deep-dive analysis or real-time speech insights.
What’s more evaluation consistency is likely to see an immediate uplift, as is agent performance through real time feedback.
3. Auto Coaching
Team leaders spend 60-80% of their buried in fragmented data or playing detective to understand performance issues. Auto coaching can bring together call data, performance stats, and behavioural insights into one view – streamlining prep time and allowing leaders to focus on actual coaching.
From an efficiency perspective, this facilitates a shift in manager-to-agent ratios from 1:12 or 1:15 to something closer to 1:18 without losing effectiveness. But beyond that, coaching quality and consistency improve and agent development is more pointed and expedited. It also unlocks the potential for automated role play both on the job and in grad bays. This provides the basis then for both greater job satisfaction among both managers and agents, as well as delivering higher quality interactions throughout the operation. All of which have an impact on broader measures such as agent attrition, CSAT and brand perception.
SIDE NOTE: While those first three use cases focus a lot on the potential for reduction in headcount, it’s often more about doing better work, not just less work. Think: HITL (Human in the Loop), not human out of the picture.
4. Identifying Vulnerable Customers
This is where AI starts playing a key role in risk management and regulatory compliance. Agents can’t always be relied upon to spot vulnerability signals in real time – especially when they’re under pressure to do many things at one in a short space of time. AI can listen in and flag when it detects signs of vulnerability, alerting the agent in the moment and ensuring the right customer journey is followed.
The benefit? Reduced regulatory risk, better outcomes for vulnerable customers, and more confidence in compliance reporting. This use case also pairs naturally with summarisation – capturing the right context and actions in the CRM.
5. Agent Assist
Beyond risk management and efficiency, AI also enables agents to add value in the moment. Agent Assist tools analyse the live conversation and suggest actions – whether it’s handling a low-value enquiry quickly, spotting a sales opportunity, or guiding a customer toward a better outcome.
This is where things get exciting. AI is no longer just reducing cost – it’s helping unlock customer lifetime value and improving journeys. It’s also a mindset shift: from cost centre to value driver.
SIDE NOTE: The constant push for self-serve may well be eroding brand loyalty, where a great conversation with an agent isn’t only about making a sale or solving a query, it’s an experience that plays into customer brand perception.
6. Hands-Free Conversations
Imagine an agent who doesn’t have to type, click around systems, or juggle tabs – just talk and listen. That’s the promise of hands-free conversations. With AI handling navigation, form filling, and admin tasks, agents can give customers their full attention.
It’s not just about productivity, it’s about truly human interactions that focus solely on the customer. How satisfying would that be? It could change the type of people you hire and shift expectations around what great service looks like.
7. Full Voice AI
Everyone’s chasing the holy grail: fully autonomous AI voice agents. Why? 24/7 customer contact, instant routing, and scalable service without scaling headcount.
But Jimmy’s message was clear – don’t rush it, though do keep your eyes on the prize. Build your maturity and path to value with easier use cases, underpinned by the right data and processes. This isn’t about flipping a switch – it’s about a journey to transformation.
Final Thoughts: Think “value first, tech second”
Across every use case, the AI you deploy is about outcomes. Whether that’s saving time and cost savings, improving job satisfaction or deepening customer relationships, AI only succeeds when it’s introduced with purpose.
Start small. Pick the use case with the clearest ROI. And don’t be afraid to move fast – but move smart.
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:
- The smart use of data from their connected networks;
- 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);
- The resources and planning know-how to deliver a reliable but efficient 24/7 service;
- 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
- 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.
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:
- 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
- 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:
- Not outsource key functions when their internal and market analysis says that that’s what’s needed; OR
- 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:
- 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).
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
Ofgem’s research shows that there has been a “decline in overall consumer satisfaction with customer service by domestic energy suppliers since 2018”. And new research undertaken by Thinks Insight and Strategy this summer highlighted that there are practical and emotional barriers to consumers – especially the most vulnerable – getting the best service from their energy suppliers.
Ofgem’s Proposal
Ofgem’s proposal covers a wide range of areas, but those of most interest to us are in the consumer customer experience and contact centre space:
- Requiring energy supplier enquiry lines to stay open longer, including evenings and weekends – and be easier to contact via multiple methods such as email, webchat or other digital-based platforms;
- Enabling more effective support for customers struggling with bills, including early intervention to identify and offer support such as temporary repayment holidays when consumers are unable to pay;
- Prioritising customers in vulnerable situations, or their representatives, who may need immediate assistance;
- Making 24/7 emergency support available for customers who are cut off from their power or gas supply due to issues with their supplier (e.g. meter faults); AND
- Compelling suppliers to make information available on customer service performance to help inform consumer choice when switching, and further drive improvements in service.
Practically what does this mean?
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An untimely Christmas present?
Ofgem intends to finalise the standards in October and have them in place by December. Of course, that’s about the most inconvenient time for energy firms, but perhaps the ideal time to put Ofgem’s ambitions to the test!
In any event, December is only 3 months away and whatever measures firms need to put in place – technology enhancements, increased internal resources or the use of outsourced support – will need to be initiated very soon.
What about the rest of us?
Of course, most of us don’t work in the energy sector, provide technology solutions or outsourced customer management services, so does this all matter?
Well, it does, because the regulated industries increasingly act as a ‘leading indicator’ for the wider economy. In terms of defining expected levels and standards of service (even if that doesn’t necessarily translate into those expectations being met). The financial services, energy and water sectors often now provide a customer template for others to follow.
If you’re supporting customers in the energy sector you might benefit from some help and support to meet the challenges presented by Ofgem’s new standards. Get in touch, we’d love to chat with you.
Missed our latest payments webinar? Not to worry, we thought we would provide you with a quick recap of what you missed.
The Panel
We were joined by a super panel of industry experts that included:
- Jeremy King (VP, Regional Head for Europe) at PCI Security Standards Council
- John Greenwood (Head of Technology & Payments) at Contact Centre Panel
- Tracey Long (VP, Programs) at PCI Security Standards Council
- Andrew Barratt (VP, Technology & Enterprise Accounts) at Coalfire
Topics Discussed
The panel covered a range of topics during the session, including questions from our live audience. Some of the pertinent talking points included:
- Why does PCI DSS apply to contact centre outsourcers?
- How does an outsourcer certify their PCI DSS compliance?
- What is the downside if the client does not ask about our compliance?
Content to catch up to
Hit the button below to get access to a recording of the session.