How do you foster a culture of innovation in your omnichannel contact center?

I believe the agents are required to understand their own goals and how to contribute to the organization’s goals and vision, we need to show them their path and build trust and share accomplishments with them, it’s also important that we value their opinion and listen to them when they communicate the customer’s concerns and encourage them to recommend solutions from their point of view.

Define clear goals for innovation within the contact centre. Whether it's improving response times, introducing new channels, or enhancing self-service options, having specific objectives provides direction.

Defining the vision and goals in a contact centre is crucial for aligning the team and achieving success. Establishing a vision and goal from the start if you want to be successful. There are 2 key components: Clarity: Clearly articulate the long-term vision for the contact centre. It should inspire and provide a sense of purpose. Alignment: Ensure the vision aligns with the overall business objectives and customer-centric values. Define SMART Goals as well as Customer Centric Goals.

Most importantly if one operates a BPO, one needs to understand the corporate client or customer vision and goals with better clarity. Accordingly, align your organisation's vision and goals to enhance the overall experience of the end customers.

The first step in creating a culture of innovation and CI is to provide a psychologically safe place for collaborating on any valuable insights. Its important to make everyone feel that they are valued and that their opinions truly matter - most basic and simplest step to adapt, with nothing extra to spend. Feelings of being important kicks the brilliance automatically looking at possibilities of ways and beyond and that's how they culturally kick start their days, meetings, conversations - that's called fostering and building a culture of CI. Seeding teams with this confidence to think brings the best in them, wearing their thinking hats always finding ways and also the means for CI, the doers do the thinking now. Fostering is seeding.

Empowering agents in a call centre is essential for improving performance, job satisfaction, and overall customer experience. Key areas to focus on are: 1- Training and Development- Continuous Learning: Provide ongoing training to enhance agents' skills and keep them updated on industry trends. Skill Diversification: Offer opportunities for agents to develop a diverse set of skills, making them more versatile in handling different types of customer interaction 2- Collaborative Culture: Team Building: Foster a collaborative team culture through regular team-building activities. Peer Recognition: Encourage agents to recognise and appreciate each other's contributions.

Empowering agents and managers in an omnichannel contact center is crucial for fostering innovation and continuous improvement. ?? By providing autonomy and resources, you enable them to make impactful decisions and solve problems effectively. Training and support are key to building their confidence and skills, which in turn unleashes their creativity and productivity. ?? Imagine a team where every member feels valued and capable—this is the foundation of a thriving, innovative contact center! ??

The contact center agents needs to be very cautious about the customer experience. It is very necessary one has to think in customer point of vie, keeping this in mind , the contact center operations has to train , get ready the supervisors and agents in this life style. The updation of tools and techniques will help the agents , supervisors reduce on the frequent works , search for information etc will greatly save the time which then can be focused on to the customer experiences.

One recommendation is to Implement Employee Suggestion Programs: Launch programs that encourage employees to submit suggestions for process improvements, technology enhancements, or better customer experiences. Act on viable suggestions promptly. This spearheads your agents and managers to trust you more and shows faith in their knowledge and feedback.

I always found that promoting Cross-Functional Collaboration encourages collaboration between departments to share insights and expertise. Cross-functional teams can provide a holistic perspective on challenges and solutions. Each team has their own unique perspective and brings their own set of ideas and insights we can all learn from.

For me iterative change is key and also having the right positive mindset. Instill a mindset of continuous improvement. Encourage employees to consistently evaluate processes and find ways to make them more efficient and effective.

Insights generated from customer interactions offer a great deal of information on which omnichannels are successful, should be expanded, and which ones need to be shut down. Call centers investing in customer intelligence are ahead of the competition and make decisions faster.

At Tele2 as Head of Customer Service, we worked with our offshore vendor partner, Transcom to handle all our customer queries. One of my early initiatives was to introduce a "Best Agent of the Month" Award in each contact centre to recognise the hard work and success of the top performing agent. Acknowledging their contributions reinforces the value of creativity within the organisation and lifts up morale and improved productivity.

There is new technique on CC world is Gamification which helps to bring the reward recognition more interesting on the table for all the CC experts who serves the customer. The gamifications sets the milestone and tasks based on Ops team can easily set rewards which then keeps cc experts energy and motivated. There are many CC solution provider has brought this solution as part of the CC software setup. This is high time to make use of this idea.

The feedback mechanism is another stronghold of call centers that helps identify which channel is working. We recently added AI-driven feedback that automatically determines what went right, what went wrong, and what can be improved. If a channel isn't working for an agent, the tool offers suggestions on how to use the channel and what can be changed.

Fostering a culture of innovation in an omnichannel contact center involves creating an environment that encourages creativity, experimentation, and continuous improvement. Key strategies include promoting open communication, empowering frontline staff, rewarding innovation, providing continuous learning opportunities, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. It's essential to embrace experimentation, maintain a customer-centric mindset, adopt enabling technologies, secure leadership support, and regularly measure and iterate on innovation initiatives. By implementing these strategies, organizations can drive exceptional customer experiences through ongoing innovation.

A culture of innovation should be instilled at the beginning, during new agent ramp-up. The L&D team must ensure that the training revolves around creativity and innovation. Omnichannel conversations should also be supported by analytics and insights to measure the effectiveness of the innovation implemented.