How the Digital Revolution Is Impacting the Contact Centre Industry

Dave Vernon shares his insight on how customer expectations of the contact centre are evolving.

The past few years have seen digital disruption move at an incredible pace, transforming almost every element of our lives; from our ease of access to services to how we purchase goods, and how we lead our everyday lives both at home and in the working environment.

In light of this, and the growing demands from customers, organisations must evolve to provide information and access across a wide range of channels.

Research suggests that improved experience can grow revenue by 5-10 percent – and cost 15-20 percent less – over a span of three years. Today’s customers demand good brand experiences regardless of the industry or business and bad customer service costs businesses $338.5 billion worldwide per year.

Additionally, with 97 percent of global consumers citing customer service as important in their brand choice and loyalty, organisations can no longer ignore the importance of a strong and consistent customer engagement strategy.

With this in mind, organisations must ensure they are clear on not only what customers want, but also what they don’t want. When thinking about transforming your contact centre, a good place to start is alleviating any ‘dissatisfiers’, the worst of which include:

• Wait times being too long for simple enquiries
• Urgent enquiries not being responded to quickly enough
• Customers needing to repeat themselves multiple times
• Customers being unable to conveniently confirm or change appointments with agents / advisors
• Company doesn’t know why the customer is getting in touch
• Self-service not being an option

Once these biggest frustrations are managed, organisations should then ensure they focus on offering the channels their customers want to interact with them through and implement a customer-centric journey.

Organisations that have embraced digital disruption to offer a truly omnichannel channel experience – this requires complete seamlessness between channels – and have implemented a customer-centric journey are those that are currently winning the battle for customer loyalty.