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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact centres have faced numerous well documented pressures over the years, but have been on the leading edge in changing how organisations engage with customers. However, as we face ongoing global uncertainty there are three challenges our sector must face head on.

Staff attraction and attrition:

What was already a challenge, seems to have got a lot harder for many. The ability to recruit from a wider pool with homeworking is now a threat as it opens local resource to others. The role of the agent has become tougher, along with their line managers whose capacity to manage and connect with their team in person has been impacted by remote working.
  
In summary, the role is harder – the profile and skills have changed, the people are fewer and when you do recruit them it is harder to spend time with them to support and develop and therefore retain.

Channel Shift:

Customers expect to be able to make contact through a wider range of channels, so that is a wider profile of SLAs to manage. The challenge is to make sure the conversations are joined up if the customer decides to switch mid-flight and the user experience for both the customer and agent are right, otherwise it could contribute to agent attrition and customer defection.

Organisations may need to implement alternate channels to reduce the cost to serve, with increasing cost pressures and/or contact volumes (sector dependent) businesses need to take every opportunity to move customers to alternate channels where they may be able to be served more quickly and therefore at a lower cost.

Automation:

Silver bullet or the opportunity to infuriate your customers and drive complaints? It is all in the delivery and there are clearly opportunities to make an impact. Providing self-serve solutions has become expected by many customers and perhaps for some organisations the easiest/highest volume activities have already been through this process. Are the gains more marginal? Where should your digital assistant sit? Do they have enough of the answers to provide a service to the customer? and how is your “bot containment” looking?

There are so many questions arising from automation, but I think we could all point to at least one example, as customer, where we feel it has been done badly. A definite conclusion is that there is plenty of work to be done upfront before you plug in and switch on the bot.

Bringing it all together

In contact centres we are consistently in a data rich environment and many of the insights we need can be hiding in the data we already hold. That information could help you to both resolve issues and optimise performance. Indicators which illustrate agent or bot skill, knowledge and performance can be accessed, assessed and actioned. Technology can probably support 60-80% of the challenges if done right, but can cause just as many, including for your internal team, if done incorrectly.

Using technology to augment or support agents and first line managers must be a key priority, along with assessing how well the tools your teams use are working and if they can be better utilised. Ask yourselves the questions, should your bot be enabling your people and is your bot running out of talent and acting as a triage that simply infuriates your customers before they get to your people and indirectly impact attrition?

For others, the answer may just be that you simply need more people now to get the job done. Then there’s the challenge to secure a budget to recruit, along with the recruitment. The questions then must be around whether there is damage being done to your brand as a result of not providing the level of service that you want or need, against what your competitors are providing. Are you impacting your future customer base because of decisions that are being made now?

If you’d like to discuss innovative ways in which to overcome these challenges and improve your customer contact operations, just drop us a line.

In February and March 2022 two more of the top 5 global tech’ giants joined Amazon and Microsoft by announcing their entry into the customer management and contact centre technology space. One of those giants was Meta, the other Google.

So, with the exception of Apple who remain firmly focused on the provision of stylish and functional computing and communication hardware as well as consumer payments services, four of the Big 5 global tech’ companies are now in a position to help organisations (irrespective of purpose, size or location) to directly support their customers.

For those of us who still remember copper wires and tin boxes with flashing lights, stored in purpose-built rooms with locked doors (usually propped open to keep the places cool), this year may well be remembered as the year that heralded the beginning of ‘the big change’. The moment when the planet’s largest and most influential infrastructure, software and communication companies began the battle to manage and add value to the entire customer data journey.

Why Big Tech is moving into contact centre technology

Well, simply consider the global positioning of any of those big 5 tech’ giants in the customer management and contact centre space. The super mature Microsoft with its ever-evolving desktop applications, cloud infrastructure, messaging and communication platforms. Amazon providing global data services and from March 2017 has been offering its own successful CCaaS application. Then the new entrants. Google with their global cloud offering now with its own global comms and contact centre AI platform. We also have Meta, who, according to phone.com have provided the world’s top 4 downloaded apps of the last decade (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram), arguably making them the world’s largest human interaction business, finally acquiring Kustomer, the successful contact centre desktop unification application.

Behind these giants there is also activity. The continued success of Twilio as a seamless global comms platform and customer engagement application builder. As well as the ambitious Zoom, having failed to acquire global UCaaS and CCaaS provider Five9 back on October last year, they launched their own contact centre application as soon as February, with a European launch planned for some time soon.

What this means for established technology providers

Whilst the beginning of ‘the big change’ may be super exciting for any organisation on the planet who has customers to manage, the business environment for the old tin box manufacturers and the world’s established, historically copper based telco’s, the competitive environment looks just a little bit harder. In the context of ‘the big change’, what I read into that is innovation and change, certainly the prospect of collaboration and consolidation to deliver that.

Expect more collaboration, consolidation and innovation

The collaboration plans of Genesys as a long-time global leader will be interesting to see play out, particularly with Zoom and Salesforce as investors in the Dec 2021 funding round.

Having lifted the bonnet of nearly 100 contact centre technology solutions and specialist applications since October 2019, when we began building the Contact Centre Panel Technology Network, we have seen some fantastic technologies and some great innovations. I am absolutely convinced we will continue to see more. We live in exciting times. Let’s see where ‘the big change’ takes us.

For the inside track on ‘the big change’ and what this means for your organisation, get in touch.

The BBC recently reported something that to my mind had already happened a while back, making WhatsApp available to businesses so that they can interact with the customers.

Here’s a quote from the BBC article in which Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that the development would help companies customise their experience and that “The best business experiences meet people where they are,”. He said at the announcement of the new service that “Already more than one billion users connect with a business account across our messaging services every week.”

So clearly customers are already using WhatsApp to engage with businesses, the change here is more about the “how”.

I do agree that customers want to be serviced where they are, the whole point of frictionless CX is making it easy and if I’m having other conversations in WhatsApp, then why not add another? The rules are clear, I must engage the company in the chat, they cannot engage me. The addition to a “Contact Us” page of a “WhatsApp Us” is a good way to support customers in that space.

The operational challenge of asynchronous messaging

From a delivery of service perspective, it can make the conversation harder as there is the asynchronous nature of a WhatsApp. As a customer I may start the chat now but not pick up the response for 3 hours, the conversation could continue for the best part of a week. This creates an interesting challenge for the business and the people within it though. Does it mean that multiple agents are going to interact with that supporter who could send messages across a timeframe that exceeds a shift or a working day? Contact centres have already been managing this situation for sure, but is the result an impact to efficiencies that servicing via WhatsApp is trying to achieve as another member of the team needs to familiarise themselves to respond to the last message? Or should we be setting a lower SLA on the follow up responses, seeing if the initial agent will be back to deal with it and leaving it for them to manage when back on shift?

I remember a time when first implementing e-mail solutions, in which trying to get the system to manage the stop and start of the clock to deal with e-mails “within the SLA” was a whole project strand. This would mean sometimes missing the reason behind the “customer” need and focusing too heavily on what the “client” had stipulated. The model was focused on one mail in and one mail out. Thankfully, technologies have moved forward now and the right blend of technology can ensure the initial phase of a conversation via messaging platforms can capture key information so the agent is best placed to resolve the query. For me, one of the best things with WhatsApp is the ability to switch from messaging to voice easily if needed all within the one channel.

“Meta Platforms Inc (including Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) have over 3.6 billion active users.” Statista

As we move into the endemic and markets recover, businesses are looking to optimise their contact centre operations. Selecting the right customer engagement technology solution has become crucial. Cost effective customer acquisition and a reduction in ‘cost to serve’ are both desirable goals but achieving them can be a challenge if you don’t have a true understanding of available technologies and their alignment to your existing environment.

We asked a number of leading industry experts a range of questions on the impact of the Bot and the types of technology that are available to underpin operational performance, including the difference in programmable products vs those that have minimal learning input before effectively replacing their human equivalents.

Will AI and Bots take over from humans as the point of contact for customers?

Natalie Calvert is the founder of CX High Performance, she has worked with over 100 companies to improve results and credits the Covid pandemic with accelerating technological change: “The bot will be the biggest disruptor of customer contact. Covid has driven digital transformation and has turned things around from the pyramid of contact being voice – email – chat before the pandemic to chat – email – voice’. Huge numbers of people have been forced or encouraged to be much more comfortable online.”

Natalie continues: “Hybrid working is also going to change our sector considerably… It has highlighted the massive gap in knowledge management. In the office, agents can put their hand up to request help. At home in the kitchen, there is nobody available to give that assistance. We have seen a rise of complaints and a lot of employee wellbeing issues can be put down to the stress that’s involved in working in isolation.”

She concludes: “The third big disruptor has to be Bots. AI will change how we’re operating. Not just from the customer point of view by making things easier, quicker and faster but also from an employee experience. The routine transactional stuff, which makes up around 50% of the workload for most organisations, will all start to move and the Bot will be the big disruptor. To run a piece of tech at a cost of £2 per hour for a bot, compared to ten times or more than for a human being, opens up the chance to reimagine what we’re doing and how we use our people and technology. This is key for us, our customers and our organisations.”

Nathan Smith is the MD and founder of Gabba, an organisation that builds chatbots to drive leads, handle customer service and reduce costs. He agrees with Natalie:

“If you want to see what’s happening and what the future holds, look at how people are communicating. If you’re under 35 right now, your primary channel is chat. In the next five years, this will only increase, regardless of demographic or location. Chat includes SMS, Whatsapp, Messenger and other apps across the board. Companies trying to engage without a chat provision are going to struggle.”

Nathan explains: “Many of us will remember that there was much argument about what used to be called Digital 2.0, which we now call Social Media. Some organisations wrongly thought it was never going to affect them.”

He adds: “If you are under 18, you might well prefer to peak to a Bot than a human. The keyword now is Omnichannel.”

Up to 74% of users prefer to use chatbots to find the answers to simple questions.

PSFK.com

AI and Bots are not always the same. It’s important to distinguish between linear processes and intelligent design. Linear automated processes are successful in many applications which have a defined start, middle and end, for example obtaining specific data for customers to process a transaction. Delivering a great customer experience in an unstructured environment, however, is less simple and if automation is to be successful, flexibility is needed.

Where AI offers a true glimpse of the future is when it is used to learn from an existing knowledge base and to provide answers to unstructured questions. Louis Halpern is Chairman of Conversations By Ami, an organisation developing AI tools to help organisations power chats and deliver customer and employee conversations based on machine learning. He points out and example of the differences between ‘command and control’ process-led systems and true AI: “We took a company’s knowledge management data and let the AI product read it with no structure applied. It’s not yet perfect but their agents found it useful within a short three-week trial. Agents have been able to find the answers to questions quickly, with the system using the information in the knowledge base in new ways to help agents with the customer conversation.”

Louis continues: “In another example, our tool read 20 CVs provided by a client. We then told it that we were looking for undergraduates and it was able to find examples that met our criteria. It had learned about degrees, Masters and other qualifications by reading the CVs we’d supplied in the dataset. This learning of unstructured information by machines opens up an exciting future for systems-based customer contact.”

Louis states: “It’s what technology can do for you, not what you can do with technology.”

By 2025, 80% of major organisations will need to have a technology focused centre of excellence or skills resource.

Gartner, Chatbot initiatives and enterprise strategy, 2020

Technology will need to be core to organisations in the customer contact space. Louis puts it succinctly: “It comes down to what technology can do for you and your clients, not what you can do with technology. That’s a massive difference.”

Of organisations identified as high performers, 48% had deployed Bots, whereas of those identified as low performers, the proportion using Bots was only 26%.

Salesforce research

By implementing Bots, AI and the right automation technologies successfully, the relative costs of using technological tools mean that in some businesses up to 90% of transactions can be handled by technology at around 15% of the costs of a human agent. This leaves plenty of budget available to support and train teams of excellent agents who will deal with the exceptional cases and deliver the highest possible quality experience to customers.

As automation develops, the opportunities to deploy it across the business magnify. Among many people within our industry, the most common feeling about automation is that it shouldn’t be used in complaint handling. However, our experts all agreed that there is no department or enquiry type that cannot be improved by the right technology. The key is learning when to involve human ‘super agents’ and enabling automation tools to be improved by better design or continued machine learning.

71% of businesses agree that scaling conversational support will allow their organisation to stay competitive or become an industry leader.

Forrester – April 2021

It seems clear that the businesses who want to be successful will be expanding the automated contact capabilities. If your business is falling behind, now is the time to take action.

Who can you talk to about the options?

Contact Centre Panel works with a network of over 200 expert partners including contact centres and technology providers. We find solutions to the greatest challenges facing the customer contact sector, whether that’s finding contact centres with the skills and resources to meet your needs or helping to remove the complexity and risk from technological decisions. We can help.

We offer solutions to help your business and customers. Our independent team of experts are driven to help you to build better partnerships and to improve the customer contact sector’s performance for everyone who works within it.

With almost six million people around England living in homes provided and supported by housing associations, ensuring that services are delivered to residents, including vulnerable people, is critical.

Whilst these are not-for-profit organisations created to provide affordable homes and to support local communities, they must ensure that support is of the highest possible standard at the most effective cost so that the maximum amount of income possible can be reinvested where it is needed most. However, as cost pressures increase how can housing associations ensure that operating costs of contact centres and service management are not eroding the monies required to maintain and build additional properties and give more families the opportunity to have a space of their own.

As England alone needs 340,000 new homes per year, including 145,000 social and affordable homes, there is significant pressure on providers with new residents to be considered, operating costs will increase because of inflation and rising wages and as the number of residents grows the cost to service them will too.

A number of organisations have turned to outsourcing as a means to support their residents, there are many benefits to this approach of using private sector expertise to deliver this including:

The automation conundrum

Working in an environment where customer contacts are often of high emotion brings challenges. Whether moving in or out of a property or if there is a repair that needs to be made, residents are more likely to be calling at a time of stress or need and who wants to speak to an IVR when feeling emotional, not me for sure.  So how do the opportunities to bring technology and automation reconcile with the imperative to deliver a personal service when support is needed? How can the use of technology ensure that those with the greatest need are attended to first?

Perhaps one solution is to get proactive, the use of insight and analytics solutions can unlock vital information and highlight trends within the housing stock, allowing housing associations to identify and remedy an issue before it even happens.

Where agent support is required it is key to ensure that they have delivered all the essential compliance and safety information that may be needed by a resident. Use an intelligent scripting and decision making tool, coupled with speech analytics, to make sure agents have done all that is necessary on the call, providing certainty for the organisation, the agent and the resident. Layer on top coaching tools and analytics and then your agent’s ongoing development is covered, whilst ensuring that key trend data is made available to the organisation. Having these processes in place means that all the right information is passed to engineer resources accurately the first time. This reduces the need for them to go back to a job, avoiding additional costs to the organisation and inconvenience to the resident.

So in summary, effective contact management can help deliver efficiency in scheduling and planning of work throughout your organisation and therefore improve service whilst reducing outlay. Plus feeding all repair data back into the analytics engine can then help with proactive scheduling of work to reduce risk.

Differentiated service

It should be considered that housing associations are the main provider of supported housing in England with 300,000 homes for older people and 115,000 for people who need extra support.

Outsourcing providers are dealing with vulnerable customers on a daily basis across all sectors and can bring both personal and technical expertise to support and develop services in this area. Access to voice analytics software in real-time can assist agents in identifying where additional care may be needed, more than a simple flag on a CRM to signify that a resident was vulnerable at the point of moving into a property. This data is linked to contact number and query routing technology to ensure that people at high risk are connected to the right support quickly. Technology can now pick up on vital clues that a resident’s situation may have changed and therefore they need to be considered as vulnerable.

Channel divergence

People are now communicating in more ways than ever before and often on multiple devices. Conversocial recently stated that: ‘Customer care teams today are 10 times more likely to resolve customer inquiries via a private channel, like Facebook Messenger and Twitter DM, than they were two years prior. What’s more, the rate of growth of conversations using private channels has accelerated to 20 times that of conversations using public channels (i.e. 900% vs 45%).’

When customers need help they should have the opportunity to interact in the channels that they feel most comfortable in, so whilst an e-mail is great for a lengthy dialogue after the event perhaps, a call has historically been the first action if you have an issue, but what about messaging platforms? These have become the key method of interaction in day to day lives and provide the opportunity to ease communication with residents. The ability to send a message and see it was received in WhatsApp, switch to a call or even a video call so that the contact centre agent can physically see an issue and in turn provide visual reassurance.

Who can you talk to about your options?

Having worked closely with a number of housing associations we have an excellent understanding of what is required to deliver excellent customer care at an affordable price. We have built a ‘best of breed’ network of over 140 contact centres and 50 technology providers, which makes us perfectly positioned to recommend and source the ‘right’ contact solutions for your business. We are entirely independent, so you know our recommendations are not driven by self-interest. Our selection process is managed by industry experts, so you will always be in safe hands.

For more information. Get in touch.

Sources:  

6M number from National Housing Federation –https://www.housing.org.uk/about-housing-associations/what-housing-associations-do/

The introduction of automation within the customer service industry continues at a rapid pace. Whilst it’s always well intentioned and designed to increase efficiency and improve the customer experience, what happens when things go wrong? We take a look at some of the potential pitfalls of automation and put forward our thoughts on how to avoid the poor use of technology within your customer-facing operations.

What’s going wrong with customer service automation?

When the customer experience is not managed well, the consequences are serious. According to Accenture’s 2018 research, 60% of customers had not made a purchase due to poor customer service, and 61% of customers had completely stopped doing business with at least one company in the last year for the same reason.

As customers ourselves, most of us can recall experiences where our interaction with a brand has been harmed by poor automation. Poor handover between automatic and human systems; confusing and over-long sequences of button-pressing either on the phone or computer keypad; excessive recorded announcements… the list goes on. It’s situations like these that are often badly implemented, which should be designed with the customer in mind to avoid potential loss of purchase or cancellation of a service.

Common mistakes include:

• Replacing a system instead of complementing it. Recognising when humans are needed is important, because it’s not practical to expect automation to address all issues and enquiries.

• Relying on a single channel. Put simply, customers use multiple channels and they expect to be able to receive customer care through the one they’re using right now. This means that information has to be available across all your channels, which need to be able to share data between each other.

• Automating complex support issues. Some issues are just too complicated to automate. Humans are better at understanding complex issues, negotiating and solving difficult problems. Good agents are also much more effective at empathising with frustrated customers. A well-handled complaint can be worth ten issue free transactions.

• Using outdated systems and information. Not maintaining data in customer-facing systems can easily result in bad information being passed to your customers. Up-to-date information allows your agents to act quickly and correctly.

Caring for your customers

From research by Salesforce and Interactive Intelligence Group – 83% of consumers need some degree of customer support while making an online purchase. The most important factors for customers who use your customer service channels are:

1. Short response times
2. Consistency across channels
3. Knowledge of staff

It’s vital that you provide an effective customer service, which addresses these factors.

Implementing robust systems to deal with the most common enquiries quickly and effectively will improve your customer experience, enabling your human agents to deal with the more complex situations with empathy and expertise, resulting in happier customers. This handover from systems to humans can also be improved with good IVR, call recording analysis and usage monitoring to enable predictive call handling.

How can your business avoid pitfalls?

There are clearly some things to avoid when implementing technology and automation in your customer service operations. If you want to improve your customer experience, not harm it, then consider the following before implementing your next automation programme:

• Automate your FAQs. The most common questions that people ask of your business should be built into an automated FAQ system, or a chatbot. This will help to solve most customer issues quickly and reduce the burden on your customer care team.

• Build automated follow up. Most visitors do not become paying customers on their first visit. By automating follow up, in the form of surveys, emails and/or targeted ads on social media, the time consuming process of sales conversion can be made much more effective.

• Predict customer behaviour. Many customer issues are predictable. By capturing data on ever interaction, repeated enquiries can be predicted and customer service times can be minimised whilst keeping customers happy.

• Design systems that are able to handover seamlessly to humans. 72% of customers blame their bad customer service experience on having to explain their problem to multiple people. This also applies to systems. Make sure that data is handed over to your agents from your systems, so that the human interaction adds value, rather than starting over again.

• Track confidence scoring. Automated systems can record words and actions which flag low confidence and negative feelings towards your brand. By redirecting selected enquiries to a human agent, customer satisfaction can be maximised.

• Update a knowledge base for every customer. After every customer interaction, update the purchases, questions, location and preferences so you can cater to their needs in future. This is as important to straightforward no-nonsense buyers as it is to customers who make frequent enquiries.

• ASK FOR FEEDBACK! Automation is not easy. Regular testing and requests for feedback from users not only helps you to improve your systems, it makes customers feel more valued while you find better ways to serve them.
While there are certainly bad examples of automation hindering the customer experience, a well-designed, tested and implemented set of systems will help you to increase customer happiness, reduce costs and improve sales. If your automation is having a negative effect or you require help finding and implementing a system, get in touch. At CCP, we have access to a network of highly skilled technology and automation experts who will be able to assist.

Our initial opinion piece questioned the fears raised in an article published by The Guardian on the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation on UK call-centre workforce. In May 2019 we revisited the subject, publishing an in-depth article that canvassed the opinions of leading minds on the subject of AI and Digital Disruption.

What were the predictions?

According to the Guardian’s sources, 45,700 jobs will disappear from the Contact Centre sector by 2021. This is a huge number of course but needs to be put in context. 1.3 million people in the UK are currently employed by around 6,200 Contact Centres – meaning that the predicted shrinkage in jobs is around 3.5%.

What does this mean for customer service and outsourcing?

There’s definitely an unstoppable momentum towards consumers shopping and seeking customer service via the internet. We’ve seen the effect this is already having on our high streets with the failure of some major retail names. However, people are not stopping shopping, they’re simply choosing the best way to shop for themselves.
Unfortunately, big decisions by some major users of outsourced Contact Centres will affect jobs as alternative providers are selected. However, this is usually the result of roles moving, not disappearing… and in most cases this movement is driven by brands seeking better performance, not by lower consumer demand for great customer experiences.
Continuing developments in AI and automation will deliver more effective ways to complete repeatable tasks, potentially reducing the number of agents required to perform the more mundane aspects of serving consumers. However, AI is a long way from delivering complete customer service solutions – even the experts we’ve spoken to agree that the major opportunities for AI and automation lie in speeding up the correct routing of enquiries, or solving the simplest and most frequent of problems.

Are there any opportunities from these shifts in technology?

Improvements in AI and internet-based customer transactions will reduce the volume of calls which human beings need to handle, we can’t argue against that. We can safely assume therefore, that in the future Contact Centres will need fewer agents overall.

However, good automation and AI implementations will leave more time for agents to deliver better service to consumers with more complex needs. This can only be good for consumers and agents alike.

At CCP we still can’t imagine a future where the human element of customer service and outbound contact doesn’t play a critical part. Contact centres will continue to provide a vital human interaction for those in-depth enquiries that robotic systems simply can’t deal with. As a result, agents will need to be trained to deal with more complex situations and empowered to deliver genuinely human judgement calls, which should increase their value as individuals and improve the loyalty of consumers to the brands that get it right.

For brands, building the right customer service experience often means choosing the right outsourced Contact Centre, which ultimately has huge potential to enable excellent customer service to be delivered using a combination of well-implemented automation and well trained, properly recognised human agents. In turn, happy customers of course become more loyal and this results in continued and increased spending.

Finding the right Contact Centre with the right skills and trained agents is critical, if you’re to provide excellent customer experience and improve loyalty from customers to your brand.
At Contact Centre Panel, we have built our business on helping brands to choose their perfect outsourcing match. Our scientific approach and industry expertise results in long-lasting, rewarding business relationships – watch our short video to see how this works.

If you’d like a free no-nonsense, no-obligation evaluation of your current Contact Centre solution, or just a quick chat about how you could improve things, contact us today:
Phone 0114 209 6120 or email info@contactcentrepanel.com today.

Sources:
The Guardian – Rise of robots threatens to terminate the UK call-centre workforce

Within the Contact Centre and Outsourcing industry, Digital Disruption is big news. Deep learning, Artificial Intelligence and chat bots are on everyone’s lips. But at the sharp end, where our services are actually delivered, what impact is really being felt?

To separate the facts from the forecasts, we spoke to two leading industry experts about the current state of digital disruption and the reality of dealing with these transformative technologies.

Our Experts

Eihab Mohamed has built on a successful career in customer engagement and contact centre outsourcing which included migrating huge multi-site, multi-language customer operations projects, and working across some of the largest sectors and clients in the industry.  More recently. as Customer Engagement Director at The Telegraph, Eihab’s was the first senior role charged with owning “Customer”, helping to shape a new outlook, in a digital age! Now Managing Director of Lighthouse Consulting Europe, Eihab brings together experts in engagement to advise major brand name clients throughout Europe and is a board director at Yourcentre, a contact centre service provider.  He is also closely involved with Sentient Machines, specialists in Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data and machine learning who use cutting edge research and natural language processing techniques to empower Contact Centres.

Graham Brown is responsible for Sales and Marketing in Europe for HGS (Hinduja Global Solutions), a leading exponent of digital advancements, working from 7 countries to bring innovative solutions to clients, without the legacy issues that can be all-too-common with large contact centre providers. HGS believes that customer expectations are common across different sectors, therefore helping customers to have better experiences is key to recognising that, in Graham’s words, “the customer is no longer king, they are dictators!”

What is the state of play for AI and Digital the Contact Centre Space?

Graham Brown, HGS: “Robotic Process Automation (RPA) already impacts front and back office in some operations. Automation supports voice interactions as well as “modern” channels like in-app messaging, webchat and social media. However, RPA is at a bit of a crossroads: there is a lot of hesitancy in the market, fuelled by lots of legacy in the infrastructures and processes of big, established businesses.

“We don’t expect to see the disappearance of voice. Personal voice communication will always have a place for complex and emotive cases. However, RPA will continue to increase its share of interaction through bots, as machine learning is more able to recognise repeatable, programmable processes to deliver the right customer outcomes.

“Most cases come back to the question: How good is your knowledge base? If your knowledge base is poor, results in automation will also be poor. Improving and continuous machine learning will continue to improve the results of RPA.

“It’s less visible to customers, but back office is where automation is already more prevalent. For example, in healthcare a lot of the decision-making activity is rule-based and follows a set process. A lot of that work has already moved offshore, initially to reduce costs using human agents, but latterly automation has been successfully introduced once processes are tied down, minimising the scope for human error and increasing processing speeds too. The result of RPA implementation is quicker, more accurate AND cheaper processing with consistent outcomes.

“For contact centres through, there’s a BIG challenge with digital disruption: most pricing and buying decisions are based on peoples’ time. Therefore automation in a time-based pricing situation actually reduces a supplier’s income! Reducing processing time and headcounts through efficiency actually reduces profitability, which is counter-intuitive. This is what holds back many big outsourcers: why would they want to re-engineer and improve if it results in reduced revenue for them? In turn, this presents a big opportunity for organisations like HGS, where helping new clients introduce digital efficiencies is a benefit to both HGS and the client.

Eihab Mohamed, Lighthouse Consulting: “The reality at the moment is that most big outsourcing organisations tend to introduce technology and AI when clients demand it, rather than driving it themselves. For example, speech analytics has been around for a couple of decades but large players are still very slow to adopt it, whereas new entrants are using it to carve out a position in the marketplace.

“Remember when CRM (Customer Relationship Management) was the buzzword in the noughties? So many organisations were system-led and the important “C”, the Customer, became forgotten! It’s the same challenge with the latest tech and AI: utilising the new tools whilst putting the customer at the centre, is the imperative.

“AI is being over-hyped. It needs to be demystified. Artificial Intelligence in our context is about applying machine learning and deep learning to improving customer experiences and profitability. There are lots of potential applications and opportunities, but there is a concern that companies claiming to have AI solutions do not, muddying the waters : a recent study reported in the FT showed that there was no evidence of AI being used in 40% of 2,800 start-up businesses. So as a first step, organisations must understand what AI is, and isn’t.

“AI in the contact centre space is definitely a real opportunity. Contact centres have access to tons of data – every customer interaction generates data that can be used to learn from. The repeating nature of contact centre communications means that machines can learn from the swathes of data collected. Not just form and key-press data either: natural language processing is now accessible to businesses when it wasn’t practical before, thanks to it becoming cheaper and easier to process.

“Gartner recently said that only 4% of contact centres have deployed conversation bots in real situations, but 38% plan to. This indicates both the growth potential and the real desire by contact centres and brands to move with the times. However, it’s important to know what you’re trying to achieve with AI and automation. What problem are you trying to solve or prevent? Customer experience, revenue generation, cost efficiency, product improvements? Understanding the data is paramount.

“Also, it’s important to have good leadership in your programme to adopt any new technology, then ownership without which your plan will go nowhere. Contact centres typically have a range of stakeholders from sales, marketing, customer service and sometimes other departments. By giving someone ownership and authority, you can drive a culture of innovation where priority is given to finding new and better ways of getting things done. Following a process of Pilot, Test, Adopt in manageable parts of your organisation, successful projects can be made to work in a controlled way before being rolled out to the main business.”

Where will the effects of Digital Disruption from new technologies be felt in the next few years?

Graham Brown, HGS: “There’s an important competitive force at play in the coming years. Tech companies with new models for delivering solutions and generating income will force contact centres to rethink how they charge their clients. A new tech business might charge a flat fee to implement a technology, whilst a more full-service outsourcer might charge a share of savings, for example. The key to success might be a more holistic view where the ability to implement new technologies is an integral part of a full-business solution, which is linked to customer service outcomes as a whole.

“From an operational point of view, RPA will drive out a proportion of live agent volume. This will mean less voice, chat and email communications. However, live agents will be handling significantly more complex interactions. These will have a more significant influence over metrics such as customer lifetime value, because the customers dealing with live agents will tend to be those with more complex, risky issues. It’s an exciting future where great contact centres with a mix of great tech and excellent agents can really add value in protecting and enhancing brands. At the moment many contact centre agents might not feel that they make a big difference: that will change.

“There will be a move away from the ‘bums on seats’ models we’ve become used to. The industry will be able to value people more, people who will generate more value and be able to justify higher price points for the value-adding services they deliver. This won’t be easy though: it will mean re-skilling a lot of people.

“For customers, self-service will improve thanks to machine learning and most interactions will be better and quicker. The days of 20 minute on-hold times should be numbered!

“Many new tech companies are great at the automation part, but not at the complex part or the handover between the two systems. Good contact centres will take a holistic look at contact volumes by channel for 100% of demand, growing new channels whilst taking care of those interactions which still need expert human involvement.

“A simple view is that volumes of voice and human interactions will steadily decrease, whilst RPA volumes will steadily increase at the same time. This won’t happen. Being able to handle the flow between automated and human channels will be vital, and it’s important to realise that other factors will influence the volumes. What if there’s a sudden product recall? A seasonal stock-shortage? How will your automated and human resources cope?

“In the short term, bots can be used to help human agents. At a recent industry event, I found that no clients felt that they had a robust bot solution available. This sounds like bad news, but bots can be used to help human agents find the right solutions for customers. Think about IT professionals: we often frown at them when they use the internet to find the solution to our computing problems, but the fact is they know where to look, while we don’t! Human agents can find answers using AI techniques to help, which leads to improvements in the AI automations which can be rolled out to customer-facing situations once they are robust enough.”

Eihab Mohamed, Lighthouse Consulting: “It’s very difficult to predict when and where the effects of Digital Disruption will be felt most strongly, because the industry is being driven so hard. £1bn is being pumped into AI and related technologies in Britain alone, so things will move quickly! New challengers and established players are involved, so we will have to adapt to change as it happens. Talking about how new technologies will achieve what outcomes is key. This will decide the priorities for the industry.

“Too much star-gazing can lead to navel-gazing though… so action is important!

“Customers don’t worry about the technologies too much. They just want answers, so the most successful businesses will be the ones who find better ways to get to those answers. If you’re going to deploy AI the greatest effect you can aim for is to improve outcomes. Using AI to analyse sentiment data, for example, will enable organisations to filter out noise quickly and identify insights to drive action. If you trust the data, you can confidently build a business case for the technology and the systems to handle repeatable interactions. These could have the capability to remove 20-30% of human contact to self-service.

“Analysis, then application of lessons from data is key. For example, to identify where best to use bots to augment human interaction rather than fully replacing it. There’s definitely a place for AI and humans alongside each other.

“Strategies have to remain fluid. Change and challenges happen quickly and, as processing power becomes better, cheaper and quicker with time, it will open up new opportunities for the businesses who are ready to take them.”

Is AI, Automation and Digital Disruption a Threat or an Opportunity?

Eihab Mohamed, Lighthouse Consulting: “Being objective, this depends on your outlook or where you sit. It’s important to understand that people will still remain your greatest asset. You still need humans to think, to strategise and to provide the creative thinking.

“There is a threat to some low-skilled roles, which are repetitive or easy and AI can replace, but successful adoption of AI technologies is all about augmenting what goes on in customer service. So, customer service roles can be made more rewarding and fulfilling without the repetition of many current processes.

“This is going to happen, the question is when. So the consideration for contact centres is about redefining roles for people who will be affected by the introduction of technology. Build roles for the future.”

Graham Brown, HGS: “Don’t be a Kodak, a Comet or a Woolworths. If you see new technology as a threat you will become irrelevant in the market. As a contact centre you have to embrace the inevitable change and understand how it works commercially. Critically, you have to find a blended way that AI and digital provides part of a whole solution.

“Digital improvements will enable us to do what we really want to do: give great customer solutions. Google killed the old Direct Enquiries service. This is not as much of a seismic shift but change is happening.

“We will probably see more large players consolidating to drive out cost reductions, but this is a short term solution which arguably protects the old business models, so it can’t last forever. The new successes will come from players who can deliver great technological solutions married to excellent human involvement.”

What do Contact Centres need to do to be successful in this rapidly-changing world?

Graham Brown, HGS: “To stay ahead of the game, contact centres need to embrace the opportunities presented by AI, machine learning and the tools that they make possible. Embed the tools and show the value that they can bring to your clients.

“This will not be easy! The way customer service is delivered will change as a result of these new technologies. You will need to change your culture, your people and your commercial arrangements to make the most of the future… but it’s not impossible.

“Surround yourself with excellent technology partners, take ownership of the future and always keep a total view of the ultimate customer experience. After all, it’s that customer experience that determines whether you’re delivering success or not.”

Eihab Mohamed, Lighthouse Consulting: “We probably have never had access to data in the way, and at the scale, that we have now. It’s impossible for humans to get through it all. Start to explore the massive amounts of data you have available and take advantage of the new ways you can analyse it to find new solutions for your customers. Get the data organised, work out what you’ve got and then work out what questions you can answer with it.  Develop an insight-driven culture beyond the data department.

“Work with a partner who can help you find the answers and the strategies to take your business forward, not just to sell you the boxes to make it possible. Then think about where you might want to take the solutions forward, such as chat and voice bots for example. The costs of entry are much lower than even a few years ago. It’s possible to implement some of these technologies on a pay-as-you-go model now.

“Decide whether you are an innovator or an imitator. First-mover advantage can be massive, but some organisations can be successful by learning from other people’s mistakes! But don’t get left behind.”

In Conclusion:

The experts we’ve spoken to are in no doubt that Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the new tools that are being made possible by the analysis of Big Data are already changing the landscape in the Contact Centre sector. Your organisation has to be ready to operate in the Brave New World of automation.

If you’re not sure whether your Contact Centre is embracing the future, talk to us here at The Contact Centre Panel for an unbiased review of your current status – just contact us by email or call 0114 209 6120 to talk about your needs. We won’t push: we will only help if you need it.

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