Future of the contact centre.

These leaders often have similar characteristics and behaviours. They have empowered cultures that motivate. And they use automation strategically to refocus people where they can add unique human value. As such, their commercial and operating models are more resilient and profitable than legacy equivalents.

They have empowered cultures that motivate. And they use automation strategically to refocus people where they can add unique human value.

All this is being played out in a world that has become quite different. Relative to pre-pandemic times, it is now characterised by shortages in supply, labour and individual resilience.

Consumers are getting used to more of their favourite things being less available. Organisations are re-learning what it takes to find and keep employees whose work-life priorities have changed. And an expanding pool of vulnerable customers and colleagues reflects how the pandemic has depleted individual resilience – making empathy a boardroom topic in the process.

Two out of three adults (66%) in the UK self-identify as having at least one vulnerability.

CCMA Research

Meanwhile the rising cost of living exacerbates an anxiety many already feel. For these reasons alone, the need to adapt and meet these challenges successfully has never been clearer.

All this is fuelling a race to reinvent how organisations work. Disruptors have been showing us glimpses of what is possible over the last decade. We are now seeing that appetite extend, from legacy leaders to aspiring scale-ups.

Contact centres are part of this wider change. As organisations re-invent how they function, so too do contact centres. For instance, Fintech challenged the legacy banks. As a result of how they responded, some of the best examples of ‘next generation’ contact centres are now to be found across the global banking sector.

However, while common customer needs and expectations require a similar set of interaction and management capabilities, there is no single roadmap for getting there. Every organisation starts from a different place, with their own legacy ecosystem and culture as they plot a path towards this new North Star.

The struggle to meet new needs.

Much of this change is being triggered by customers. Contactless engagement during the pandemic has resulted in enduring digital habits. Research shows greater uptake across all the modalities of voice, text and video whether live or self-service. That’s despite the fact that many customers remain underwhelmed with the current way in which omni-channel is deployed.

Consumers have deepened their mobile lifestyles. Despite near universal adoption, many organisations still miss the point that smartphones offer service designers a set of unique capabilities with which to reinvent customer interaction. And don’t imagine that a digital first agenda must look a certain way. The pent-up desire for face-to-face engagement after prolonged lockdown has reminded us that we are social by nature. Living our lives in the presence of others matters as much to our well-being as the convenience of online shopping and the avoidance of crowds and effort. Customers want these worlds to fuse together rather than see one replaced by the other.

This struggle to meet new customer needs is mirrored in unmet employee needs. Working from home has been liberating in terms of commute-less working and greater flexibility. Equally it has been a lonely experience for many: not to mention exhausting, in terms of demanding customers and the limitations of using homes as proxy workplaces.

We know there is a road still to be travelled in terms of supporting hybrid working. Proactive well-being support is the new differentiator for those looking at organisations they want to be part of. This expectation extends from rebuilding resilience after months of isolation to delivering scalable, personalised learning pathways for those in pursuit of new career milestones.

Working from home has also been a technical challenge. Forklifting contact centres from an office to home environment was the stand-out event at the outset of the pandemic in terms of going ‘above and beyond’. As we look forward, the issue becomes one of professionalising an environment that might have ended up being a temporary trend, until we came to terms with the business continuity implications of an enduring pandemic.

Therefore, gaps must now be closed in terms of system reliability and access, quality of service, available functionality, security and health and safety auditing of remote sites. The new reality is that permanent hybrid working implies common standards across office and home environments. No doubt the challenge of trying to achieve this outcome using on premise infrastructure will drive another cohort to experiment with cloud options in due course.
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