Does the Contact Centre have a future?

Source: https://www.natterbox.com/blog/contact-centre-future/
With the rise in such a variety of communication devices,
does the Contact Centre really have a future?
In today’s society, we take for granted the vast amount of
smart technology that surrounds us, and over the years the decline in ‘offline’
communication, for example phone calls, suggests the direction that our future
is heading.
So what insights can business learn from this to ensure
customers receive the best experience with changing expectations, and
understand what the future holds for contact centres?
How do
customers choose to interact with companies?
We’re seeing a definite decline in the standard ways of
interacting with companies, with the phone and IVR dropping dramatically,
alongside email, face to face and the use of website. Apps appear to be the way
forward.
However, with more and more consumers being goal directed,
and those goals being positive, negative or neutral – customers are looking for
a quick and easy way to communicate.
Customers in crisis will generally pick up the phone and in
such situations can’t handle a long winded IVR or a long list of FAQs. High
customer effort leads to high customer disloyalty.
So,
how do you push people to the right channel?
The phone remains a key part of the digital strategy and is
the escalation channel for all age ranges. In fact, 84% have called a contact
centre within the past 6 months and 47% use video to resolve problems with
products & services.
At the end of the day, customers want to be treated as
human beings, with a swift resolution to their needs.
Personal, proactive and predictive messaging in the age of
GDPR, they’ll share their data with you, if you give them something meaningful,
but can we anticipate a customer’s needs before they need them?
Andrew
McGuigan, Head of World Wide Customer Service Strategy at Microsoft
Andrew focused on the customer experience framework and how
companies should be encouraging active listeners and become a business that is
focused on you.
So are we asking the right questions? What you are trying
to achieve? How can our solutions help you? We need to care for our customers
and prevent them from having an issue that could cause irritation.
Steve
Morrell, Principal Analyst at Contact Babel
Steve offered some insights based on 15 years of research
and over 4000 surveys with UK Contact Centres. For example, the speed for someone
to answer was 41 seconds in 2018, compared to 17 seconds in 2003. What’s
slowing us down?
The average length of a service call has increased from 3
mins 55 secs to 5 mins and 12 secs – an increase of 33%, probably due to the
complexity of the calls being answered. However, first contact resolution has
barely changed since 2003 – 77% vs 74% and self-service has made queries
simpler.
Social media is fine for simple things, but this is not the
best way to interact with our customers. The phone remains the best way to
interact.
Key
customer stats:
·
66% have phone interactions directly with
drivers who deliver online purchases to home or work.
·
66% of customers find dealing with customer
service issues exhausting.
·
79% are more loyal to organisations that are
easy & simple to contact.
·
21% currently use a company’s smart phone app
to get in contact.
Source: BT Global
Despite the huge hype, social media hasn’t taken off the
way that we thought it would – It has its place, but it’s not for everything.
“Conversocial” spoke about the shift from public social media to private social
media and messaging.
Investment in CRM & Agent desktop remains one of the
top 5 investments until 2020, with speech analytics showing a growing interest.
With AI being mentioned everywhere, a really key message is
that AI will not replace agents, it will be used to augment them.
Chatbots will improve self-service success rates – but it’s
still very early days for AI, especially for customer acceptance. AI is here
for the long term, it’s not here today and gone tomorrow, so we’ll be seeing a
lot more of it.
Humans
don’t scale – Bots don’t build relationships
How do you get to a place where the interaction with a
brand is simple?
SLAs are becoming XLAs (Experience Level Agreement). SLAs
have traditionally been focused on service, but XLAs are focused on the
customer. XLAs don’t need to be complicated and customer experience can help communicate
and demonstrate value to the business.
Gerry
Brown, CX Research Director, IDC:
The CX market is growing to a $100 billion market. However,
our perception of customer experience is going down, as there just isn’t enough
thinking about the customer or the bigger picture.
Gerry gave us fascinating insights into the CX role models,
naming and shaming the CX villains, taken from the which report.
Ultimately customer experience belongs in your company
culture, with many company’s having a head of customer experience sitting
within HR. You need to start with the customer and work back to digital –
simplify and standardise was a repetitive message, alongside providing
individual, personalised experiences.
7 CX
Bucket List Items 2019:
1. AI for
personalisation, consent and conversations.
2. Big
Data Analytics for customer intelligence.
3. Content
Marketing and Customer journeys
4. Link
online and offline
5. Engage
employees, happy employees = happy customers.
6. Build
shared CX values
7. Get
the whole organisation behind CX change management.
There’s lots of talk around multi-channel and Omni-channel
– multiple channels of choice – but who’s choice is it! Who does the channel
really benefit? The customer must always be at the forefront of our minds.
PCI
Pal offered interesting facts about our relationship with online payments:
41% of British consumers will stop spending with a brand
forever, compared to just 21% of the US, following a data breach.
·
UK consumers trust local stores more than a
national company.
·
Over ½ the UK and US consumers feel troubled
when reading their credit card details over the phone.
·
44% of Americans are reportedly victims of
security breaches, compared to 38% in the UK.
·
1 in 5 Brits hang up if you ask them to provide
their credit card details over the phone.
·
6/10 UK consumers want companies to undergo
regular security audits.
·
Consumers expect companies to use technology to
improve their security.
Ultimately, I believe there will always be a place for a
contact centre, we’ll always need some form of assistance and some way of
contacting the organisation providing the service. As time moves on, this will
hopefully become easier and less frustrating and there is certainly already
technology in place to assist in making the customer journey easy and painless.
At the end of the day the future of the contact centre is in the hands of the customer!
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To explore more about the future of the contact centre or to speak to Natterbox, why not Register Free here for Customer Contact X 2019?
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