Collectively Customer Contact Panel (CCP) have a lot of experience in contact centres and CX. However, as things are changing rapidly in the world of AI, we met with CCP to discuss some of the broader considerations, including what technology we could deliver as an alternative view of what could be our probable future reality with the support of AI – we agreed we would share the output.   

The art of the possible?  

We can talk about the pace and the tone of this piece, however the reality is that with appropriate questions raised and some boundaries that we included (some for our amusement) the content within this 10 minute AI generated “BotCast” not only demonstrates the capabilities of AI, but raises some interesting questions and considerations as to how CX evolves and what guard rails need to be in place.  

Click here and have a listen, and of course, if you want to discuss we’d be happy to deploy some of our humans. 

When you assemble a room of people with extensive levels of contact centre experience, as we did for our event hosted at Sutherland Labs, you know from the noise levels over coffee there are going to be some great conversations! Add some fantastic speakers from our outsource and technology networks to share their views of the market and a lively, open dialogue around challenges and opportunities (new and old) will follow.

We are looking forward to continuing these conversations and scheduling another event.  But in the meantime, how do we bring so much collective experience together in a short article that does justice to the quality of the conversations?

Navigating Business Decisions in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape

In the current environment, companies face a range of critical decisions, from implementing new technologies to fostering employee engagement. Despite knowing what needs to be done, many organisations struggle to translate that knowledge into actionable outcomes. This disconnect is often a result of inadequate systems, outdated training and coaching models, and an inability to adapt to change. 

In our recent L&D survey it was apparent that there is a clear gap between knowing and doing.  Results show that while employees understand their roles, there’s a significant disconnect between knowledge and execution. This is particularly evident in how businesses approach training, often relying on outdated, “once-and-done” programmes that fail to evolve alongside the changing work environment. As companies shift to remote work, many are noticing a reduction in employee loyalty and engagement, partially because of the lack of in-person interaction and relationship-building.

Addressing the Changing Needs: Evolving Training and Technology

To bridge this gap, organisations must rethink how they train their employees, particularly if they are to continue with a work from home or hybrid working model. Has enough been done to redesign training and refresher modules that better fit a virtual environment? Equally, more needs to be done to focus on continuous education rather than static, one-time courses which tick a box for compliance. Furthermore, conversational AI can be a powerful tool in reshaping learning; allowing employees to ask dynamic, evolving questions rather than relying on predefined solutions.

AI offers the potential to unlock the true capabilities of people and data, but as we have said before is not a silver bullet. It can revolutionise business processes by supporting employees in their roles, reducing friction, and enhancing decision-making. AI can also help agents manage customer queries more efficiently, giving them access to foundational knowledge in real-time. However, the challenge lies in positioning AI correctly: not as a threat to jobs, but as a tool for augmenting human capabilities.

For example, AI’s ability to analyse customer intent and apply insights to guide agents through complex interactions can dramatically improve customer experience (CX). By properly integrating AI into business workflows, companies could potentially resolve the eternal challenge of moving from being seen as a cost centre to profit centre, unlocking new value opportunities across the customer journey.

Location strategy is still a consideration as the global market evolves. The outsourcing industry, particularly in sectors like fintech, IT support, and healthcare, appears poised for significant growth.  We know countries such as South Africa have already emerged as strategic hubs for business services, offering talent and capabilities that align with the growing demand for multilingual and technologically adept service providers. Whilst there are valid concerns as to the capacity that remains available, with 33% unemployment in South Africa (60% for young people) as well as the wider continent opening for business, then combined with the capabilities of technology great opportunities remain available.

Overcoming Challenges in AI Adoption

While AI presents numerous opportunities, it also comes with significant challenges. Many process owners may be hesitant to adopt AI due to concerns about how it will impact their workforce and customer relationships. Meanwhile, senior leadership may be focused more heavily on the potential cost saving benefits.  There’s a widespread misconception that AI will replace jobs, particularly in customer service. However, AI’s true value lies in assisting and enhancing human roles, not replacing them.

For businesses to adopt AI successfully, they need to:

• Align AI with company goals and culture: AI should be seen not as a technology investment, but as a strategic asset that drives both customer and employee experience.
• Shift from a cost-saving mindset to a value-driven approach: Technology shouldn’t be about cutting costs; it should unlock value, address problems at their root cause and improve service quality.
• Build the right business case: Secure buy-in from different budget owners by emphasising how AI can enhance outcomes across the organisation.

Aligning Metrics and Culture for the AI-Driven World

To fully leverage AI’s potential, cultural and operational changes are required. Business leaders need to:

• Align metrics with an automated world: Ensure that technology handles routine tasks, allowing people to focus on complex, human-centric work.
• Redefine the agent role: The agents of the future will need to deliver more value and possess different skills compared to traditional customer service roles.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement: Embrace ongoing evolution, where AI serves to complement human skills and free up time for higher-value tasks.
• Focus on proactive engagement: Let technology handle the repetitive, allowing people to engage with customers in a more meaningful way.
• Encourage bravery in decision-making: Leaders must support bold decisions around AI investment to drive long-term success.

Irrespective of delivery location, the future of CX delivery will increasingly rely on AI and automation to enhance customer journeys, optimise operations, and drive sustainable growth.

Transformation is never-ending. Businesses must approach AI and automation not as one-time projects but as ongoing evolutions. This requires understanding the unique challenges they face, aligning technology with business goals, and ensuring that AI enhances rather than replaces the human element.

With the right strategy, AI can unlock unprecedented opportunities for growth, helping companies stay competitive in a rapidly changing world. However, without the appropriate attention to employee experience, success will be illusory or limited.

Delivering the right experiences

At Customer Contact Panel we support organisations in delivering contact centres that match their ambitions. In a Deloitte Digital research articles from May 2024 it was cited that 55% of contact centre leaders reported that they didn’t meet their strategic goals in 2023 and 76% reported that their agents were overwhelmed by systems and information*.

If you are facing challenges meeting your strategic goals or fulfilling the ambitions you have for your people, customers or technology, we have the experience to support you. Just ask. 

*Balancing priorities in a new era of contact center transformation – Deloitte Digital

Running a contact centre can be tough and a real challenge, so it is always good to know you are not alone.

However, tapping into our teams experience in running and managing a contact centre operations over the past 25+ years, we thought we’d highlight the top 4 common contact centre challenges seen in centres today:

1. Call Duration – this isn’t talking to agents about AHT, but inefficient process resulting in higher AHT is still an issue for many. Agent knowledge/competence could be part of the solution, however so could appropriate automation.
2. Repeat Contacts – whether intentional (process requirement) or unintended as a result of unclear information these contribute to:
   • Cost to serve
   • Customer retention
   • Agent frustrations
3. Improve Service Levels – in recent years average speed of answer has increased, queries have become more complex and recruitment has become tougher!
4. Understanding The Possibilities – Technology is evolving at pace and as a result it can be hard to understand the art of the possible. The CCP network has >120 technology and >220 outsource partners – so there’s plenty of options to find the right fit.

Are you facing similar challenges within your contact centre? Not sure where to start when it comes to finding the right fix? Weel look no further than CCP, we are here to provide both generous and equitable advice when it comes to your customer contact operations.

Click here to contact the team today.

Say it quietly if you like, but businesses are grown and maintained through increases in customer numbers and/or customer value. Undoubtedly cost management is also a critical factor, but ultimately sales and retention activity that provides topline growth is critical to ongoing success and business value.

We all know that the chances of winning or retaining a customer are increased when you provide a great product or service. And that those who deliver, not just on price but perceived value, are in prime position to pick up customers from competitors when they do not.

Yet many businesses are focused on the potential cost savings that could be achieved through AI and automation. Have they have lost sight of the potential benefits of delivering a personalised service and those golden opportunities to encourage a customer to buy more or stay for longer?

Are you getting the best sales through service opportunities from AI and automation?

There are two key scenarios that could be playing out for many organisations, both B2B and B2C. Either of which could be limiting sales success:

1. The technology is doing great stuff

Customers are getting the service that they need in the moment they need it. Which means the brand is working on the assumption that because they’re well-served, they will come back to buy more. However, they are not engaged with these customers, they are simply dealing with their admin when they need to and as a result are being passive in their habits. This may work for on a number of levels, and it is reducing the cost to serve. However, is this a step away from brand bypass, as ultimately a gap in the connection with customers will result in them moving on when they see a better offer?

2. The technology isn’t hitting the mark

Customers are trying to resolve their issues, but are struggling. The automation or self-serve models don’t provide the right options and/or have no ‘way out’ for customers and as a result they become frustrated. So at the first opportunity, they are going to look to an alternative brand.

The examples are out there in key sectors.

Ofgem March 2024 data 

Harder to contact and less satisfying to deal with?

Despite and improving picture, the latest Ofgem data shows that 16% of customers find it difficult to contact their supplier, up from the low of 10% in Q1 2019.  Meanwhile, the same Ofgem data suggests that overall satisfaction with customer service across the energy industry currently sits at 66%, down from the peak of 74% seen in Q2 of 2020.

What’s more, the latest UKCSI data shows utilities performing the poorest with a score of 69.8. Telecommunications and Media brands are doing a little better at 73.3 (though down from January’s 74.7), but are still some distance short of the podium positions achieved by Retail (non-food) at 80.4, Tourism at 79.3 and Banks & Building Societies at 79.3. However, we can see drops in satisfaction across the board.

Could automation be contributing to those less satisfying experiences?

UKCSI data from earlier in the year tells us that for 53.7% of automated contacts, the customer still needed to speak with a human being.

Equally concerning, though, was that neither AI/chatbot or customer service employees are managing to resolve customer queries more than 54.2% of the time, as seen in the January results. Quite the damning indictment.

Consider also that 45.4% of customers would avoid using an organisation again due to poor use of technology.

Clearly there is work to be done.

Companies with higher customer satisfaction show stronger growth

But what is the impact of this on a brand’s fortunes? Is the 2-point drop in score for Telcos material?

Research in the UKCSI report from January 2024 shows that between 2017 and 2023 “companies with customer satisfaction at least one point higher than their sector average achieved stronger revenue growth”.

With c.80% higher compound revenue growth, 6.6% higher EBITDA, more than double the operating profit margin and a whopping £283.9k – more than half as much again – revenue per employee on the table for that increase of just one point, the importance of customer satisfaction to both the topline and the bottom line is stark. On the other side, the virtual lack of revenue growth and much reduced operating profit margin for 1-point lower puts into context the plight of Tourism, Leisure, Insurance, Public Services and the rather more beleaguered Telcos.

The same report highlights that 27.6% of customers who score an organisation 9 or 10 out of 10 for overall satisfaction will look to buy other products or services from them, whilst 20.8% of customers scoring 1 to 4 will spend less with the organisation and 41% scoring them at 1 to 4 will avoid dealing with the organisation again in the future if possible.

And so, it is easy to see why investment in customer service is critical to the success of an organisation. Why an organisation should be – and hopefully is – highly focused on it. And why a pure cost-reduction focus for automation or AI is short-sighted.

While these numbers tell quite the story, let’s assume things are the right side of the line service-wise, whether through AI or not. The next question then is, are you following up with the appropriate sales activity to effect further topline growth?

Are you ready to pick up the sales baton?

Effective sales operations depend on 7 key factors for growth, the same apply to both sales team and those required to deliver sales through service:

1. Access to the best people with the necessary sales and communication skills,
2. Clear reward and recognition structures with incentives, creating a culture and environment which encourages growth,
3. Appropriate product knowledge and ongoing team development, ability to handle objections effectively and to share learning to advance the performance of the team,
4. Effective technology which the team can leverage to access customer insights, understand which are the best customers to be contacted, when to contact them and what solutions to offer,
5. Practical approaches to sales compliance, which provide clear guidelines but can be managed without excessive burden to managers, allowing sales to be signed off effectively and if necessary, learning applied in a timely manner,
6. Ability to manage data and reporting to maximise sales opportunities which benefits the organisation, the sales agents and also the customers through ensuring access to right information at the right time,
7. Understand market conditions, customer behaviours and how your team needs to react to these.

If just one of these seven isn’t working too well, sales will suffer. But so may customer service or perceived value. For example, an intrusive offer in the middle of a customer complaint is likely to occur as unempathetic and may see the customer running for the hills. A well-handled complaint can increase value – or at least maintain it.

A colleague described a recent interaction about a problematic return with a well-known retailer, where mid-conversation they were invited to look at product that may interest them. Unsurprisingly, their reaction was not to immediately head to the link to browse, but instead to give a sharp retort – and then tell anyone who cared to listen how annoyed they were.

Not only did the retailer not make the sale, they likely turned the customer off. An excellent example of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7 (at least) not working. Not only was it bad scripting and a lesson in not what not to do, it may speak to overly aggressive reward structures and an environment that favours sales over growth. The nuance of which is important and why point four is critical – this was not the best customer to be contacted in this way at that time.

The same colleague similarly experienced rather odd service (from a Telco…) in store recently, where a service conversation without a satisfactory outcome turned to an attempt to upsell on a different product, followed by a recommendation to leave the brand for the product where the service outcome was unsatisfactory. Quite the rollercoaster! And no doubt an experience driven by a particular sales focus that the brand’s managers would be horrified to learn they have – let’s hope – inadvertently incentivised.

Picking your moment to turn service into sales is critically important and relies heavily on the skill of the individual, their training and incentivisation, supported by culture, technology and management.

With so much focus on customer service, do you have the need, will and capacity to optimise sales?

Great agents who can both serve and sell can be hard to find, and can be even harder to retain..

The use of technology and automation is increasingly expected for customer service – and rightly so, simple service issues don’t need complex solutions. But they do need human intervention when the service question isn’t simple, or the automated response fails. Or perhaps when a sales opportunity requires a more personal service.

The ability to deal with customers, their nuanced needs and when selling, their objections, still has a high level of dependency on human interaction.

Yet the data from Ofgem and UKCSI both illustrate that customers are frequently frustrated by both automated and agent interactions. Service delivery in many sectors is still some way short of previous highs, meaning there are still gaps to fix in customer service before you can even think of perhaps selling.

And to some extent, when improving customer experience can deliver increased revenue, getting the basics of service right first is a significant route to growth and building value – whether you agree or not about whether they ought to be, measures such as revenue growth, EBITDA and revenue per employee are important to investors and share price.

How you achieve optimised service, then layer on sales through service or even pure sales activity is a significant question. Each have their own challenges, but successful outcomes add up to an organisation that both sells to and retains customers optimally.

Guest Author – Elaine Seculer (Head of Marketing at Taskaler)

As we dive deeper into the knockout stages of the Euros (dare we mention it), did you know that Pakistan is the largest producer of hand-sewn footballs? In fact, the official footballs used in the last two FIFA World Cups were crafted in Pakistan.

But there’s more to Pakistan than footballs; it’s also emerging as a leading location for outsourcing, offering unique benefits over many offshore countries that might first come to mind, which places Pakistan as an attractive alternative well-worth considering.

We speak with Jawad Farooq and Elaine Seculer of Taskaler to get the inside track on Pakistan as the latest outsourcing destination of choice!

1. The Rise of Pakistan in the Outsourcing World

When you think of outsourcing, countries like India, South Africa, and the Philippines are the destinations you probably first think off. They’ve been popular choices for years. However, these markets are becoming saturated, with increased costs being felt of late – that’s where Pakistan steps in!

A hidden gem if you may, not yet overrun with competition, meaning you can find high-quality talent at very competitive rates. Early birds in the market are already reaping the benefits!

2. Why Pakistan is Cost-Efficient?

Pakistan’s stock market has seen unprecedented levels of growth of late. The KSE-100 Index, tracking the largest companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange is at a 6 year high, making it the top performer among Asian frontier markets, thanks to improving economic conditions and a favourable IMF deal which boosted investor confidence.

Whilst the country’s currency (rupee) is relatively weak, this has been highly favourable for international businesses who receive a healthy exchange rate against the dollar.

Did you know? Pakistan’s outsourcing rates are even more competitive than India’s, which has long been the go-to for outsourcing!

3. English Proficiency and Education

Pakistan’s Constitution and Laws are written in English. English is recognised as the official language and is widely used in business and higher education. This means that communication is smooth and easy, with about half of the educated population speaking English.

4. Big Brands and Business Environment

Pakistan is already attracting big brands, with businesses like Audi, BMW, Samsung, Unilever, Nestle, Carrefour, and Standard Chartered all successfully running their operations in Pakistan for years now. This shows that Pakistan has the infrastructure and capability to support large-scale business operations. Plus, with Pakistan being four hours ahead of British Summer Time (BST), you can easily set up shift patterns that cover your core business hours, making it convenient for meetings and collaboration.

5. A Thriving Start-Up Scene

Pakistan isn’t just about established companies; it’s also buzzing with start-up activity. There are numerous start-up incubators, funded by both private investors and global giants like Google, fostering a vibrant and innovative ecosystem.

Piqued your interest?

If you’re curious and want to explore more, drop us a line – we’d be more than happy to help you discover all that Pakistan has to offer for your business!

Like it or not, AI is coming and it will change how we talk to customers. But there are risks. What if those customers are vulnerable? Can AI look after them properly? And while we’re thinking about vulnerability, as AI increasingly consumes customer data, what needs to be done to look after that too?

On June 25^th Customer Contact Panel hosted an event with CXReview at the IBM Innovation Studio in London on this very topic. Speakers included Gemma Woodcock of IBM, Jim Steven of Experian, Elaine Lee of Reynolds Busby Lee and Keith Shanks of CXReview.

Steve Sullivan of CCP was master of ceremonies and led the discussion.
Here we outline the key takeaways from all speakers for what we can do right now to mitigate those risks and set contact centres on a path to responsible use of AI. 

Contact Centre AI: Not if but when

• The event focused on: Outlining the risks and considerations when implementing AI and automation, and
• The adoption scope within the Contact Centre environment, specifically supporting agents to deal with the ‘cognitive load’ when handling vulnerability and more challenging customer contacts, whilst maintaining quality and overall customer experience.

While there was much discussion around Al, Generative AI and the inevitable impact on our roles, we are still a long way from a time where agents will not be required in customer contact; we’ve evolved too far as humans for this to change. However, ignore AI at your peril. 

“Consider those that did not take the internet seriously, those on the high street who failed to embrace it and look at what happened to them”

Gemma Woodcock of IBM

The AI data question

Ultimately the use of AI depends upon building models that can make predictions that add value. These are dependent on what the source data looks like. Ensuring correct identification and use of the right material is essential; wrong information can lead at best to incorrect responses and at worst to biases or hallucinations, all of which carry considerable risk to brands and their customers.

Consider also that using the questions that your customers ask you to inform future responses may not be typical – for example they may have arisen from an unusual event at a specific point in time – and if you treat them as such, this may lead to incorrect or just plain weird future responses. . Moreover, if the answers to those questions relate to your own IP and you are using open-source solutions, you may be making your IP available to others.

Additionally, who you are sourcing your solution from needs to be considered. In March 2023 alone there were 14,700 start-ups established in the AI space. Which means due diligence and an understanding of how AI solutions, which are often highly specific by nature, work together is essential.

That isn’t to say everything in AI is new. The early concepts and mathematics of AI date back to the 1950s and 60s. Over the last decade or so, increases in computing power have begun to make AI more commercially accessible. Which means AI and machine learning is already well-established in using models that look at patterns, as we’ve long since seen for Amazon purchase recommendations, or in more recent years the introduction of machine learning and explainable AI in credit scoring.

As is often the way with AI, these are specific use cases with an enormous amount of investment behind them to make them function well, particularly to allow for the use of AI in regulated industries. One aspect of these is that they depend on properly labelled data. Which is already well-ordered and highly specific in the world of credit risk. But the process of labelling data, especially data that isn’t already extremely well-ordered, is intensive and expensive.

Imagine then the complexities of labelling data in natural language usage and you begin to understand the significance of recent advances from the likes of IBM’s Watson – or the oft referenced ChatGPT – in Generative AI. In customer contact, these are what we call “foundation models”. They are pre-trained and need prompts, but can’t answer questions specific to your customers without customer data and an understanding of how customers are likely to interact. These large language models can be applied to this process – they can use

labelled data and the numerous ways to ask the same question in the past to develop further to meet your and your customers’ needs.  

4 key tests for effective AI

The use of Generative AI should have 4 key considerations:

1. Open: use of best technologies and innovation
2. Trusted: can you trust the outputs
3. Targeted: designed on specific use cases
4. Empowering: ability to augment the human role/experience, not to replace it.

Pretraining and governance funnels need to be in place, with considerations ranging from the benefits of the use case to ensuring only the necessary inputs go into the model. Put simply, if nothing “inappropriate” goes in, then nothing inappropriate can come out. Additionally, this approach means it should cost less to set up the model and take less energy (power) to run. Remembering just how energy intensive AI can be, this is an important consideration.

When it comes to Risks, Regulations, and Technological requirements, there needs to be a level of governance. And during scoping of your solution, you need to consider the ongoing effort required to support it to ensure it meets – and continues to meet – strict governance. AI is not a fire and forget implementation.

AI and the bad guys

“It isn’t only the good guys that are using AI and Automation, ‘mal-actors’ are using it to enhance their processes too.”

We were fortunate to be joined by Jim Steven of Experian who shared with us some of the activity he has seen from his work in managing data breach responses. This has implications on multiple levels.

• Consolidation of data: bringing everything together to enable automation could mean that you are at greater risk if your business is breached. Additionally, using suppliers with cloud-hosted data may mean that their breach becomes your breach too.
• Benefits of automation are not exclusive to those doing good: we are not the only ones that can leverage great technology. Those with mal-intent are using it too; and they will typically do so more quickly.
• Consideration of how those impacted by a breach find the experience: when a breach occurs, it is likely that it will be across your entire estate of stakeholders. Therefore, it is not just your customers that will be impacted – it will also be employees, former employees, pension members, contractors and suppliers.

Communication with people who have had their data compromised is personal, it needs to be managed in different cohorts and isn’t really something to automate – especially with your employees, who you will need to support your customers through the situation with empathy and understanding. Not only that, but it’s important not to lose sight of the millions of customers who don’t currently interact online at all – they aren’t typically digitally savvy and may not even consider that their data is an important asset that can be used for nefarious means.. They must  be informed and supported in ways that work best for them, cognisant that it is us who hold their data digitally.

Moreover, data breaches are not always one way – it’s not always about theft or ‘acquisition’ of data. Looping back to the theme of ensuring that you consider what data is held in the system for interpretation, bear in mind that even the simplest upload of additional data to your systems can impact operations. For example, there was an accidental, entirely innocent, upload of bad data to air traffic control systems in 2023 that resulted in 98% of aircraft being grounded.

People accessing and uploading bad data to your network could equally paralyse your organisation. Be mindful that centralising your information management may enable system vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

What about vulnerable customers and AI?

Elaine Lee joined us to speak about vulnerable customers and the need to ensure that we are considering them in our approach to technology and process solutions.

“40% of Companies are not doing well enough when identifying and supporting vulnerable customers.”

The FCA considers 52% of UK population to be vulnerable. The impact of the cost of living crisis on the UK population is that 25% of adults now have low financial resilience and the drivers of vulnerability are varied, including:

• Health
• Capability
• Life Events
• Resilience
• Equality
• Access

Remember, vulnerability isn’t static. We may be displaying vulnerability and require additional support today, but not in a few weeks’ time.

With 40% of companies already not doing well enough when identifying and supporting vulnerable customers, how will the introduction of AI affect those customers? Of course, there is a spectrum of risk. So it’s important to understand who and where your customers are on that spectrum at any given time, and the potential for harm – understanding what they are vulnerable to?

People may also be vulnerable through lack of access or confidence with digital tools, they may be under pressure financially through the continuing cost-of-living crisis or low financial resilience, they may be experiencing a physical or mental health condition or going through a life event that changes their ability to make decisions in the usual way.

When implementing changes, ensure that you have properly tested your solutions to work effectively for vulnerability. Use diverse customer panels and map the possibilities for different customer types. The effort needed to get it right does have a financial impact on your business, but if you succeed it will reduce customer complaints, increase engagement and therefore increase customer value.

Use cases and how to implement AI safely in Contact Centres

CXReview’s Keith Shanks rounded up the presentations with a reminder of the history of automation and AI use in contact centres. He highlighted the predictive dialler as being a key example of great technology that when implemented either badly or with mal-intent, has negatively impacted consumer perception and experience.

“Automation in Contact Centres: It isn’t new. It’s been around for years with mixed results through implementation.”

Due the nature of the customer contact operations, there are plenty of use cases that can be considered for development and implementation.

• Ensuring consistency and pace
• Automation of decision making
• Increased accuracy
• Assisting agents in dealing with complex customer contacts
• Enabling access to the right information at the right time.

However, we need to be cognisant of the potential challenges and ensure that these are properly addressed.

• Data privacy
• Security
• Vulnerabilities of both organisations and individuals
• How we ask our people to engage with the use of technology

With great opportunity comes great responsibility

If you would like to discuss more around how you are implementing AI and automation within your organisation and what it may mean to your people, customers or processes, then please contact the team.

Additionally, we are able to provide access to content from the day if you would like to read further.

Manufacturers are having to grapple with a vast range of challenges; supply chain difficulties, skills gaps, changing commercial and distribution models, harnessing the potential of automation and AI, to name just a few. In which case the role, purpose and configuration of contact centres may seem like a question for another day.

But communicating with and managing customers is now a core undertaking – and manufacturers changing how they do it can have significant positive impacts across the rest of their business.

Customers, customer everywhere!

Managing customers in a commercially effective and brand-enhancing manner is a challenge, but the first challenge is often to define exactly who those customers are.

For manufactures they may well include: end-users, service and maintenance providers, sales agents and distributors, logistics and shipping agents, governmental agencies – as well as colleagues such as finance, billing, mobile engineers and so on.

All these customers have their specific needs and expectations, but all need to be handled and addressed in a manageable way, with best practice techniques developed, optimised and consistently deployed.

The financial case for consolidation of contract centre activities is often obvious, but the adoption of new contact centre advisor-supporting tools and technologies now make a high-performing, multi-skilled service a feasible reality.

A tower of babel?

Today, very few manufacturers can afford to operate in a single language market or markets. Globalised supply chains mean that – whether selling direct to end-users or through dedicated or networked agents and distributors – manufacturers inhabit a multilingual world. Without the ability to interact remotely with customers across most or all of the languages they use, firms will limit their scope to penetrate overseas markets and/or rise up the value chain with the product/service proposition.

Irrespective of the undoubted advances made in translation technologies which can enable multilingual customer support, operating a multilingual contacts centre – be that in a centralised hub, or through distributed in-country operations – is very challenging and costly. Increasingly, the skills to do so successfully – and leverage those supporting technologies – is a specialised undertaking.

Facing up to the cybersecurity threat

The threat from cybercrime and data security challenges more generally grow and grow. Aviva’ research suggests that 20% of UK businesses are subject to cybercrime annually (https://www.aviva.com/newsroom/news-releases/2023/12/One-in-five-businesses-have-been-victims-of-cyber-attack-in-the-last-year/ ) and the impact of such crime is increasing as organisations’ digital shifts progress.

Distributed, ill-managed systems and lines of communication often present firms’ greatest areas of vulnerability. Added to which ‘social engineering’ and scammers’ targeting of individuals employees continues to account for most points of corporate failure, giving criminals access to vital systems and data.

Professional, secure and well-trained contact centre operations can provide a robust defence against the cybercrime threat. Again, a consolidated contact centre function, with tested processes and technology to underpin data control, isn’t a guarantee of cyber resilience. But it’s a great way to address threats whilst building internal coherence and capabilities.

Need to talk?

Customer Contact  Panel  based in Sheffield, a city with a proud industrial history and a strength in advanced manufacturing technologies. So, we know a little bit about manufacturing, but we know a lot about contact centres! Contact centre services are intrinsic to the manufacturing sector’s success. We can help guide firms through the best approaches, infrastructures and technologies to deliver the best customer management. This includes outsourcing to specialist providers who can deploy their expertise and insight, allowing manufacturing firms to focus on developing their products and services.

We’re always happy to chat. Get in touch