I’ve recently returned from a contact centre conference in Amsterdam. In between scoffing far too many pastries, I dropped in on a number of panel conversations and software demos by the event sponsors.
Lots of these were quite neat, with some really interesting new tech on show. However, what struck me was the difference between the rhetoric of the demonstrators and the more grounded questions from the audience. Whilst the vendors were understandably keen to push various new advanced technologies, the people who run contact centres day-to-day were (on the whole) more interested in the practicalities of getting the basics right.
For me, this illustrates a pretty sound principle. Contact centre leaders should absolutely stay abreast of the latest possibilities, innovation, and technology, but when deciding where to invest, they should prioritise getting a solid CX in place before doing anything too “out there”.
Around a third to a half of the new clients I work with want to introduce the latest tech channel to help improve CX. This is understandable, they’re usually operating in a competitive environment and the sales pitch from tech companies can be pretty persuasive.
But, whenever a client wants to get stuck into a new whizzy bit of tech, I need to establish whether the existing contact streams are working at their optimum. It can make me look like I don’t want to embrace cutting-edge tech, but I’m fine with that because, before we can effectively introduce any technological change, we need to make sure the existing avenues are working well.
Some examples of where we may want to fix the basics before getting too carried away with innovation:
- Aiming for “hyper-personalisation” might be the dream, but start with making sure you have a clean case history at customer-level that can be digested easily by agents
- Adding every possible social channel under the sun, or experimenting with video, is probably unwise right now if all your other channels (say, voice or email) have slow response times or aren’t mutually integrated
- Make sure you have the will and the processes to act upon your existing customer insight if you are going to buy expensive customer data management tools
- Have an adequate knowledge base, in other words, a good set of FAQs, and a process for maintaining it before getting too far with conversational AI
Lots of more mature contact centres do have the basics in place – in which case they should indeed be innovating to see how they can find the next gain. But customers still mostly value support that is fast, reasonably effortless and accurate.
Sometimes the old-fashioned ideas work best!
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