April, 20208 IN MYV EWThere is no doubt that the core of most discussions in improving contact centers is the focus on customer experience and technology, and I think this is great! It's probably also fair to say that customer service professionals are finally getting more of their voice heard at an executive level. This is due to the shift towards customer centricity and technology utilization to scale direct communications and have a better understanding of the relationship between customer experience and growth. So, when we think about what the contact center of the future could look like, we should start by understanding the current pain points and the desired future state that organizations are striving for.Working client-side for the last 10 years, I've had a much better understanding of what contact centers of varying sizes have had to deal with. Whether it be tedious manual processes, compliance requirements, marketing that has not explained an offer properly or technology that just always seem to get in the way of progress. Multi-year infrastructure projects with CRMs, ERPs, and the all-important contact center platform conversation have contributed to the technology concerns of support professionals. It is these kinds of pain points which organizations are striving to smooth out so they can focus on the job at hand, supporting customers and their needs.Customer support professionals are starting to see an increase in the speed of evolution in how organizations approach customer experience and how effective their contact center activities are in the modern business environment. The new breed of CX leaders are now equipped to quantify the relationship between CX performance with customer retention and growth. And along with that, a new mandate by CEOs to be more customer-centric and remove friction, increase conversion and growth customer advocates in the market place. How this is tempered with brand leadership and market differentiation is yet to be seen, but at least our CEOs are now prioritizing their investment in their CX capability, and along with that a voice for customer service professionals in the boardroom.So we have some pain points, we have the support of the CEO, and we now have access to a whole suite of technology, but how do we transition from the current state to the future state of our contact center?In my experience in working with our General Manager of Client Services at Neds in building our contact centers in Brisbane and Darwin, we had the rare opportunity to design processes and workflows that tightly integrate with other key communication functions from the get-go. This includes streamlining communications between marketing, products, and support so that we can better resource, address root-cause issues, utilize modern technology to scale and evolve our product offering and ensure our online help center is accessible and accurate.Of course, we still have a lot of work to do, but being a relatively new technology organization in a high-transaction industry online wagering and sports betting (last year we had over $1bn in wagering turnover), we had the opportunity to try a lot of new things. So, whilst we had the opportunity to just go all-in with key systems and process, we took an approach of building capability that can be changed easily, knowing that the future will always require some level of change.What are my wishlist items for the contact center of the future?Speed If there is a common pain-point for support staff, it's speed. Agents being able to access account information and trigger workflows faster as our customers are expecting faster responses and decrease case resolution times. As a customer, nothing is more cliché than an agent saying, "Sorry, my computer is running slow today." If we are expecting our agents to manage multiple live chat instances as well as email and answer the phone at the same time, let us not impede their agility with slow computers or slow software. This is the last thing a customer expects, particularly if they have just had to wait in a queue!DREAMING ABOUT THE CONTACT CENTER OF THE FUTUREChristian BowmanBY CHRISTIAN BOWMAN, GENERAL MANAGER OF CX & ENGAGEMENT, NEDS
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