Will changes for other businesses lead to a realisation that contact centres have been progressive in their approach and potentially increase the recruitment pool or will contact centre leaders need to make changes to become more competitive in recruitment of the best talent?

Perhaps we are more progressive in contact centres than we give ourselves credit for?

We’ve written before around the view that despite our collective best efforts, our industry can often have something of an image problem with those on the outside, and, unfortunately, for some who work in the sector as well, because of arcane processes that may have been applied by some managers.

Working in contact centres can be tough and is seen by many as an interim role as opposed to a career path. The use of terms like CX may make it a more noble cause, even if the gap between customer ambition and realities can seem large. However, (I hope!) many people reading this article will recall a journey from a stop-gap role to a ‘proper’ career, which has delivered job satisfaction, personal development, promotions and a level of reward which affords a quality standard of living and the attainment of life goals.

You may also reflect on the flexibility that working in contact centres may have afforded you in your life, initially from being in operations in which there were options as a result of:

  • 7 days per week, which may have resulted in working a weekend day, but having time off in the week,
  • 24/7 operations where dealing with something through the night resulted in lieu time at a convenient time
  • Creating 4 day weeks with compressed hours to enable flexibility for your staff and ensure capacity where your customers needed it
  • Split shifts (ok maybe not 25 years ago, when that meant going to work twice in the same day, but post pandemic with home working)
  • Part time shifts which worked around the school run or after lectures
  • The ability to work remotely and therefore mitigate communing time

So, perhaps when talking about flexible working and encouraging greater control over work-life balance we should already be seeing contact centres of a beacon of what can be achieved (even if that does sometimes mean rolling rotas to ensure that customers have access to support when they need it?).

But it doesn’t end there does it?

Contact centres – through necessity in some cases, of course – have embraced the real living wage and providing better rewards for frontline staff. However, the reality is that skilled contact centre agents may still be earning similar amounts to those in roles where there may be less stress or pressure. Self-service and automation mean there are less “easy” contacts and as customer expectations and levels of knowledge increase, the role does get harder.  Put simply, there is more for agents to deal with now, when considering the complexity of queries and vulnerabilities of customers.

Admittedly, where costs are key and businesses are feeling pressure to manage the cost of customer service and acquisition, then offshoring has been the norm for some time. As we know, offshoring doesn’t necessarily reduce quality, but it takes hard work to get it right. The manufacturing sector had already followed this route, in many cases years earlier.  Unfortunately, our industry faces more scrutiny for moving work out of the UK than others, it seems.

The same customer service ‘exceptionalism’ may also apply to automation, with a recent Gartner survey highlighting that 64% of customers would rather companies didn’t use AI in customer service delivery.

Out of necessity the industry will keep pace with changes to minimum wage, however there will be an inevitable impact to either the cost of the product or margins. In which case more innovative techniques will need to be adopted to maximise margins.

I’d like to think we’ve been pioneers in ensuring equality. When I see news pieces around gender and representation of women in boardrooms, I reflect on the fantastic female influences I’ve had through my career, senior management and directors who have shaped my career and given me opportunities to develop.

I believe that contact centres are (for want of a better term) unfortunately ahead of the changing employment curve. I say unfortunately as contact centres’ relative enlightenment can disadvantage other sectors.  I don’t have access to contact centre-specific data on gender pay gaps. And though I assume a gap is still sadly probable, I would think it is relatively lower in contact centres, based on the skill, talent and mindset that we have in the sector, 

“Women hold about 41% of senior leadership positions within the UK contact centre industry”

UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide 2024

So, could this be a new dawn of realisation?

We were discussing last week the same story in multiple newspaper articles around easyJet and their recruitment of people aged 50 and above for cabin crew roles, citing their life and communication skills as a key benefit to passengers and by extension their new employer.

The shift rotas offered the flexibility of working alternate weeks, for example, or four days on four days off (I recall that over 20 years ago in contact centres we called this a continental shift pattern). This type of recruitment should open up the ability to recruit people who previously decided to leave full time employment after the pandemic back into roles.

Admittedly, customer service at 35,000ft may have more appeal for some than dealing with a phone call or webchat concerning a utility bill, for example.  However, in contact centres we recognise clearly that life skills and knowledge are of significant benefit to our customers and have been recruiting from all demographics for decades.

“We tackle misconceptions about the job and broaden horizons for even more talented people looking for a new opportunity who can bring their wealth of life experience to the industry”.

Michael Brown, Director of Cabin Services at easyJet

 

We believe that we are well ahead of other sectors in our approach to working practices and rights. Undeniably, negative perceptions evoking the ‘dark satanic mills’ persist for many and horror stories from 20 years ago (and occasionally today) remain.  But the contact centre industry is probably in a better place than we are given credit for.

We will however need to manage challenges as a result of changes to legislation around worker rights, there are likely to be changes in WFM that will need to be considered, potential impacts to payroll and management of holidays.

Additionally, there may be changes harder to identify on the surface – maintaining knowledge and communications when more people work compressed hours could be one.

We have the skills and tools ready to support altered employment practices and we’ve demonstrated time and time again that we can change when needed.  If you are facing challenges maintaining employee knowledge and experience, managing performance metrics or even protecting a sustainable margin in your contact centre operations then you won’t be alone.   

“Once seen as a modern-day mills and bastions of the overseer, contact centres should, rightly, be lauded and credited for leading the charge for innovative working practices such as the compressed hours working week, and flexible shifts around childcare responsibilities which the industry introduced at the dawn of the contact centre”.

Gerard O’Hare, WorkNest Legal Director

We are here to help, just ask.

The Customer Contact Panel team is made up of contact centre professionals who have seen a number of challenges and changes in the sector over the past 30 years, we use our experience to support both in-house operations, those wanting to outsource and outsourcers to deliver contact centres that match their ambitions whether that be sales or service.

If you have a thorny challenge then we’d love to hear about it, we share our thinking and have supported fantastic brands in finding the right fit solution for their and their employees’ needs.  We have over 220 contact centre partners and 120 technology partners, we don’t have favourites only right fits for your needs.   

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

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

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

We are seeing organisational stress in three areas:

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

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

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

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

Observing change in the global customer contact outsourcing market

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

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

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

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

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

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

Striving to deliver an equitable position to accommodate permanent change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognising the barriers to change

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

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

We’ve been a little busy lately. You may have spotted that we’re no longer Contact Centre Panel but Customer Contact Panel. So still CCP, but with a twist.

Why, we hear you ask! Well there are a few very good reasons behind our new identity. And we’ve gone beyond our name and website too.

What’s in a name?

It’s a big question. We’re known as CCP. So having considered whether we wanted to be something other than CCP, well not really, no.

But we’re very much about progress and the reality is that the humble Call Centre became a Contact Centre as channels such as email and SMS were added to customer contact methods, which of course now encompass livechat, social media, chatbots, WhatsApp and more. During the covid pandemic, the Contact Centre became less of a centre as home working increased.

And actually, we’ve changed quite a lot since we were founded in 2015 too. Where we started as a ‘different kind’ of contact centre broker – a badge that while true is wrapped up in connotations of backhanders, inflated fees and favourtism, the kind of practice we set out to provide a fair and transparent alternative to – today, we’re much more than that.

We’re all about Customer Contact excellence, wherever and how ever it happens – insourced or outsourced, offshore, onshore or near shore. Outbound sales, inbound customer servicing. From the people to the tech that makes it happen.

Which is why we’re simplified our offer too.

The CCP Offer

Our people here at CCP are your panel of customer contact experts and we will help you to:

  1. Contact Centre Optimisation: Do more with what you’ve got, whether you’re an in-house brand operation or outsourcer looking to improve.
  2. Contact Centre Sourcing: Find an outsourcer that is perfect for your needs. The brand doesn’t pay a penny for this and the outsourcer fees are the same for everyone, which keeps us completely impartial and focused on the best outcome.
  3. Technology Planning and Selection: Plan your technology and select providers to take advantage of the latest innovations in ways that work for you.

So there you have it – Customer Contact Panel.

And the new ‘look and feel’?

We wanted to make sure our independence and moral compass was front and centre of what we do. Which is why we landed on ‘Refreshingly Equitable’. We’d like to think a conversation with us feels like a breath of fresh air. That you feel our natural generosity with our expertise and enthusiasm to help you implement innovations or deal with challenges.

And you can’t be refreshing with a grey website. It wasn’t our colour. Didn’t really suit us. So it’s been consigned to history. We hope you feel that how we look and sound on paper now matches more closely with who you meet and know as people.

Here’s to our next chapter. We hope you come along for the ride.

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 25th 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.

Over the past few years Bulgaria has certainly made it’s name in the world of contact centre outsourcing. Not only are business in Europe choosing Bulgaria as their nearshore destination of choice, but businesses in the US are now casting their eye over towards the east.

If you did ever find yourself in Bulgaria’s bustling capital city Sofia, you might be greeted by one of its 1.3 million residents with “Zdraveĭte, radvam se da se zapoznaem!” (Hello! I am glad to meet you). However, if you’re like me and rely on a translator, there’s absolutely no need to fear as over 1.7 million people in Bulgaria can speak English. Other European languages spoken in Bulgaria include (but not limited to):

We recently caught up with waterdrop®’s very own Martin Vatchkov to get an on the ground view of Bulgaria. Not only is Martin a Bulgarian national living in Austria, Martin has also previously outsourced his customer service operations within Bulgaria:

“Здравей (Bulgarian “Hello”)! Diving straight in on why Bulgaria, which is mainly driven by the fact that Bulgaria has a highly effective language school system, where most European languages are extensively and effectively thought, the baseline is rather high and difficult to beat.

The university of “St. Kliment Ohridski” in Sofia has added another building block to the already high level of schooling within Bulgaria. This has brought some rather rare languages to Bulgaria such as Japanese, Korean, Arabic or the Nordic languages to name a few.

Once you get past the languages, another strong positive for Bulgaria would be the Geographic location. +2 hours from GMT and +7 hours from EST in the US, with US shifts (16:00 to 01:00) being something normal. Distance in my opinion is another asset at around a 3-hour flight, from most places in the European peninsula which is a rather short flight. Companies have started to explore the whole country with the opening of offices at the seaside (Varna and Burgas) and not only the capital, Sofia.

On another note, the fact that Bulgaria is part of the EU and NATO, brings GDPR with ease (contractual wise, as no data is leaving the EU) as well as economic stability. Internet downtime is almost nonexistent with high speeds.

Last but not least, the BPO and ITO industries are rather filled with the younger part of the generation which bring a lot of ideas and high engagement rates. AI is no foreign word and working efficiently is certainly a big asset as both industries have been embodied quite well in the countries’ economy.”

Thanks Martin! Contact Centre Panel too has had some terrific experiences with contact centre’s in Bulgaria, and we think you will too.

Like what you hear about Bulgaria and want to find out more? Get in touch, we’re here to help.

Our very own Neville Doughty recently caught up with Sean McIver for MaxContact‘s latest episode of Talk Time, discussing how successful outsourcing is built on a foundation of trust, respect, and a shared commitment to sustainability and fairness.

Take a look at the snippet from Nev for a sneak preview.

To listen to the full episode, click on this link.

The full range of Talk Time episodes can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Words cannot even begin to describe what the people of Ukraine have had to endure over the past 18 months, since the war began. However, through this adversity, the outsourcing industry in Ukraine has remained resilient and is still very much open for business – providing a lifeline to those who need it most.

Before the conflict, Ukraine was well on its way to becoming the European hotspot for incredible tech talent and cost-effective solutions for both BPO and ITO services. Has the war changed this? Well, the simple answer is no. Ukraine has had to adapt, there’s no question about that, including looking at how employees in the sector operate and remain safe (which is of the upmost priority). However, the country is still able to rival its Eastern European neighbours in terms of quality of service and cost effectiveness.

When it comes to outsourcing in Ukraine, it’s employees speak English to a very high level – which includes adapting to cultural nuances of other countries with ease. We would say Ukrainian’s have a firm grasp of how Western businesses work. This means Ukrainians are excellent at collaborating with teams from other countries, especially for those business who already have an inhouse team and are looking for an outsourced partner to supplement the numbers they already have internally.

I recently pulled up a chair and had a chat with another of Ukraine’s own, Konstantin Ryzhov, the CEO of Simply Contact. Operating since 2012, Simply Contact has several offices operating in Ukraine, including their Poland office as part of recent expansion. I asked Konstantin a number of questions about outsourcing in Ukraine, with the most pertinent one being, “why outsource to Ukraine?”.

“In Ukraine, we place a strong emphasis on education, especially language skills. This means our contact centers have people who are adept in various languages and also deliver services with high quality. Plus, Ukraine is amazing at adjusting and coming up with new ideas when times get tough. The way Ukrainian companies remain stable and grow during hard circumstances is truly impressive.”

As Konstantin mentioned, the advantages of outsourcing contact center services to Ukraine are quite noteworthy. Let’s take a moment to review these key points:

1. Multilingual agents

Ukraine can offer a broad range of languages, with high proficiency in English and other main European languages. It is an ideal choice for serving a global customer base.

2. Cost-effectiveness without compromising quality

In the realm of outsourcing, balancing cost and quality is crucial. Ukraine excels here, offering competitive pricing without compromising service standards. This balance is particularly attractive to businesses looking to optimise their customer service operations.

3. Time zone advantage

Ukraine’s geographical location and time zone are beneficial for serving European and Asian markets. Also, it offers reasonable alignment with North American business hours. This enables more effective and timely customer service across different regions, 24/7.

4. Diverse talent pool

Ukraine has a large and diverse talent pool. This variety enables you to find the right match for your specific customer service needs, whether it’s technical support, multilingual services, or industry-specific expertise.

Are you considering outsourcing to Ukraine, but want to find out more? Reach out to CCP, we’d be more than happy 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:

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:  

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.

Like it or not, we’re in an evolutionary stage of the Contact Centre. The exponential growth in communication channels has inevitably created more customer contact, with organisations looking to automation technology as the solution to our CX ills.

Consequently, Contact Centre agents everywhere, are now on a path that sees them handling ever more taxing conversations. We blithely refer to these as the complex calls, having shunted the simplistic stuff off down the self-serve shoot or to cheaper destinations. But oftentimes, what remains as ‘complex’ are really ‘complaints’ by another name.

Thankfully however, in the big-rolling-rock-Indiana-Jones-style avoidance of impending doom, we’ve spotted that all we need to do is hire agents with empathetic ability. Empathy will save the day. Or will it?

Can we look to science for the answer?

There’s a wealth of scientific research to show that empathy is developed very early on; in babies in fact, as this article explains.  The same article however, also points out a cautionary note about those best able to demonstrate empathy:

“Unfortunately, empathy can have some downsides. For example, the second requirement—feeling the same thing that someone else is feeling—can cause some personal distress. In fact, children who are particularly prone to feeling negative emotions are more prone to experiencing empathy (Spinrad and Eisenberg, 2019). In other words, children who are already extra sensitive, might experience intense negative emotions because of high empathetic concern for others.”

Finding the right balance

So, how are we to balance this desire to build upon the empathic ability of our front line employees with our duty of care for them? In an industry struggling to make improvements in all areas, not least staff retention, I believe the answers lie in three main areas:

  1. Recruitment – acknowledging that difficult conversations may be a frequent part of the role is an important part of setting expectations and discussing how the agent will be supported in either an office or home-based scenario, is vital. In my experience, those companies that practice great onboarding habits, with buddy systems and 2-way discussions throughout the ‘grad-bay’ experience, stand to gain most by way of employee loyalty and feelings of trust.
  2. Leadership – if we’re to hire agents with the ‘soft’ skills and attitude to deliver the best customer experience, it goes without saying that their managerial support system is competent in recognising the signs of burnout, detachment or worse. Equipping those often similarly young first time people managers, the team leaders, with the leadership qualities and techniques to manage stressful situations, is just as important.
  3. Analytics software – and finally, whilst tech might be getting a bad rap for creating the complex vs simple call flows, the technology of analytics points the way to understanding what’s happening on every interaction. It’s vital therefore that we apply it to dig deep into the archaeological layer if you will, where the evidence of sentiment will highlight where best to focus support and which areas of the customer experience are creating the most ‘resistance’.

I think Indy would approve.

Beverley Hughes is an independent consultant in the Contact Centre industry with over 30 years’ experience. Working with a variety of clients across commercial, operations and technology, she is known for bringing a pragmatic, ‘hands on’ approach to problem solving and possessing a limitless enthusiasm for the industry.

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:

  1. 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;
  2. 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;
  3. Prioritising customers in vulnerable situations, or their representatives, who may need immediate assistance;
  4. 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
  5. 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.