The Future of Contact Centers is Enriching Human Interactions. Are You Prepared?

The contact center at many organizations doesn’t get the strategic consideration it deserves. My former contact center team at British Telecom seemed to be viewed primarily as a cost center, a necessary expense. As a result, their team was always pressured to streamline staffing, coached to be as efficient as possible with multiple priorities, and designed to generate the least amount of cost. 

These measures weren’t bad business principles, but they also didn’t send the best signal to the team. Contact center employees felt like second-class citizens in the organization, not nearly as valuable or venerated as sales and marketing.

However, the contact center should have been valued. The contact center is an essential component to your experience, and also contains a wealth of information about your customers. With all that rich data pouring in, the contact center can be a front-line help to the company and the company’s brand. 

The tide is turning regarding how organizations view the contact center. We have the pandemic to thank for part of this realization about the contact center’s value. One of the few good things that came out of the pandemic was the acceleration of technology adoption and comfort. Plus, the need for contact center workers to work from home meant that organizations had to embrace the cloud, which is an essential element for the contact center technology of the future.

In this episode, we host Thomas Goodmanson, President and CEO of Calabrio, a global Customer Experience intelligence company that builds software to enrich customer interactions. Goodmanson explains the future of contact centers and why now is an excellent time to be in the contact center game. 

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Goodmanson points out that high turnover rates are a source of frustration for many contact center organizations. Turnover makes it difficult to train your people in the skills necessary to deliver that experience you want for your brand. If you don’t have that front-line team there for the context, the data you collect is full of all your customer behavior insights, but inaccessible to put to work for your customer strategy. 

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

• 05:41  Goodmanson explains which parts of the employee experience of the contact center employee are broken and why. 
• 08:30  Colin asks Goodmanson to take a deeper dive into how the software available for contact centers enriches human interactions and where that ties into Calabrio’s customer experience intelligence field.
• 14:21  We discuss the area of self-service and how some generational differences might drive the channels for future contact centers.    
• 18:48  Goodmanson describes how software innovation will alleviate some of the stresses and pain points associated with a call center employee’s daily work.   
• 22:00  Colin shares his view about how the experiences of the future that will be most successful are those that are proactive, and asks what Goodmanson thinks about that, too. 
• 24:37  All three of the hosts share their advice and key takeaways for the future of contact centers.     

 

This episode is sponsored by Calabrio. 

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. 

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