The Evolution of Digital Innovation in the Contact Centre

Sabio has published new research that shines a light on the evolution of digital innovation in the contact centre.

The report, entitled ‘Dealing in Digital’, offers insight into the modern contact centre environment and challenges faced by today’s contact centre agents.

Commissioned by Sabio and conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC), the paper focuses on the digital transformation journeys of five companies with significant contact centre operations.

The companies were HomeServe, Royal London, Advanced, Computacenter and Welsh Water – each at varying stages of their digital innovation and transformation journeys.

The report highlights current challenges and opportunities they face, as well as providing visibility on how the agent experience has evolved.

Tim Pickard, Chief Marketing Officer at Sabio Group, said: “The purpose of this research was to better understand how digital innovation is evolving in the contact centre space.

“The report offers an insight into the contact centre environment through the lens of five organisations with significant contact centre operations.

“What has emerged is a clear indication that it is crucial that organisations need to support contact centre agents with the technology they need to deliver experiences that customers both expect and deserve.

“The solution is clear – if not on the agenda already, it’s time that brands seriously begin to think about modernising their contact centre operations using digital innovation and AI, as well as considering new approaches to improve agent well-being and tackling attrition rates head-on.”

Among the highlights of the research was the progress the surveyed brands had made in digital innovation.

HomeServe reduced the pressure on their 800-strong agent workforce through the introduction of a customer self-service hub platform.

The multinational home maintenance insurer now ensures its agents deal with higher-value requests and not basic repetitive tasks – with 70% of 6,000 calls per day now routed through an automated voice assistant.

“We’ve gone from 6% of all claims being fully automated in our last financial year, to 20% this year – a huge improvement,” said Phil Jordan, Head of Contact Channel Automation at HomeServe.

Royal London, the UK mutual life, pensions and investment company, has 1,100 agents. Historically, it was focused on telephony as the main contact route but wanted to offer more digital and self-serve capability for customers as well as increase automated channels.

They’ve since introduced a mobile app to help customers track information relating to pensions as well as additional chatbot capability.

Richard Basham-Jones, Customer Experience Director at Royal London, said: “The positive impact of the introduction of digital innovation on contact centre agents outweighs the new challenges it creates for them. However, just because this is the case, management needs to still ensure its proactively addressing these challenges.”

Download Sabio and IDC’s InfoBrief in its entirety here.

About Sabio

Sabio Group is a global digital customer experience (CX) transformation specialist with major operations in the UK (England and Scotland), Spain, France, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and India. Through its own technology, and that of world-class technology leaders such as Amazon Connect, Avaya, Genesys, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Twilio and Verint, Sabio helps organisations optimise their customer journeys by making better decisions across their multiple contact channels.

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