"A career in a contact centre? Imagine that!"

Are career cultures possible in today’s contact centres?

I have worked in contact centres from 1998. A time when the industry (whilst not new) was still finding its technological and work-culture feet. Working in this game was a bit of a wild-west work life experience and certainly less regulated than the industry is today.

Was it then and is it still an industry where an agent can choose to establish a long-term career?

Before we answer that question, let’s take a quick tour of the journey of the UK contact centre from its humble beginnings to where we are now for some context.

So, before the term ‘call centre’ (I shudder at that phrase today) and ‘contact centre’ became commonplace, there were offices taking and making customer calls in one organised guise or another since the 50’s.

By the way, I shudder at the ‘call centre’ terminology simply because it’s attached to that historic ‘sweat shop’ reputation and unregulated and pretty poor outbound culture of years gone by that damaged our industry’s reputation so much. Before the now more professional outbound/ inbound world existed. ‘Contact Centre’ is a far more friendly and professional term that talks to a customer’s decision to reach out proactively and also references ‘contact’ across multiple channels as opposed to ‘call’ and so, talks to how we’ve advanced.

OUR INDUSTRY: SOME OF THE JOURNEY FOR CONTEXT.

The first ACD technology in the early 60’s gave birth to the concept of more efficient and higher volume call handling and distribution. It wasn’t really until the 70’s when this new tech was really employed effectively. Lloyds Bank opened the first truly recognised ‘call centre’ in the UK in the 70’s to answer general queries and handle customer complaints. It wasn’t long before Lloyds twigged that outbound sales and upselling was an astonishing new opportunity and so began theirs and the following copycat industry’s outbound and inbound call centre revolution.

The late 70’s and early 80’s saw the new fangled IVR born and suddenly the relationship between IVR and ACD took hold. The former arranging customers into a distributable stack which the ACD would then traffic to the right agents in the most efficient way possible. Handled volumes went up and the industry felt slicker and more tech savvy. It also started to become quite a demanding and unique place to work and learn a new craft. For customer’s, it was a challenge to keep up and the automated IVR menu’s became a commonplace frustration for customer’s for years until this became a standard norm and part of the experience.

Direct Line are regarded to be the first business in the world to have set up a dedicated outbound sales and proactive customer contact centre in the mid-80’s.

From this point, the outbound unsolicited sales contact centre revolution took off vertically. A great way for businesses to flatten their marketing and direct sales costs and overheads, but so also began the public backlash and the ‘sweat shops’ and ‘aggressive sales’ reputations that contact centre’s would take three decades to shake off. In fact, it’s a reputation which still sticks and has held the public trust in our industry back incredibly.

People started to complain about unsolicited calls into their homes with pushy sales agent’s up-selling, selling, cross-selling and generally invading the downtime and privacy of many people who turned on the industry with seriously high numbers of complaints. Scripts were robotically administered and regulation was minimal.

Regulation did follow and best practice governance kicked in to control the ‘gung-ho’ actors in the game and bring about a fair and consistently customer focused approach to outbound sales. Nonetheless, the damage has been lasting and this (in the largest part) is where the negative reputation of ‘sweatshops’ and ‘pushy sales’ for contacts centres stemmed from.

All this considered, the ‘call centre’ revolution was supercharged and with it came swathes of impressive technological innovation and advancement, making the jobs and experiences in the industry more interesting, more complexed and more skilled.

By the 90’s, The UK proudly boasted the largest call centre industry (soon to start the transition to being called ‘contact centres’) in the world.

In the early 00’s we started to see the shift of jobs in the industry to near and off-shored centres in other countries as UK business chased the cheaper cost to serve and reduce their outlay to increase their margins. Many regard this vertical shift to off-shoring so aggressively as having pushed the industry’s reputation back 10 steps in the eye of Joe Public as they found it hard to adjust and trust.

Whilst the off-shoring revolution further developed innovations in contact centre Technology and certainly made the world a smaller place, there were problems in how this shift impacted popular common trust in the industry.

The slowly recovering ‘jobs for the under-skilled’ and ‘sweat shops’ reputations were now being further ballooned by walls of complaints from customers about language barriers, concerns about data security and so on. There followed over the next decade, a return of many of those off-shored businesses back to the UK.

The reputation improved greatly as the industry took charge of itself and took ownership of itself over many years and worked hard to be better and do better by its customers.??

Covid hit the country and the world and with it came a need and an opportunity for the UK contact centre industry to step up and be present for their customers at a time where it was needed more than ever before.

Whilst there were numerous cases of some businesses doing great work and the right things during the pandemic to deliver the best possible customer experiences, there were unfortunately too many businesses who seized the pandemic as an opportunity to shut lines, shrink their investment in their customer contact centres and throw up barriers using covid-19 as a reason for customers waiting hours, days and often weeks to be heard and helped. Sadly, there are still examples today where some companies ‘still’ use the pandemic as an excuse for reduced support.

This whole scenario once again took the industry back a step or two and public confidence dropped.

Throughout all of this journey, the industry continued to develop and invest in technology which improved IVR and ACD efficiency and automation started to really play an effective part in the customer experience with self service and partially assisted service helping customers.

Multi-channel centres using the world’s most impressive technology are now common-place in the UK and with the public perception is improving again.

SO… Can a person enter the contact centre industry and build a lasting and skilled career? My answer to that is a bold and underlined YES!

This is a unique industry in so many respects.

A person with little experience or skills can enter at the ground floor in the contact centre industry and with the right kind of leadership and development can learn incredibly useful skills and use some incredible technology and processes to learn how to deliver experiences to customers which really help.

An agent can develop complexed and impressive personal growth, skillsets and technological awareness and progress into leadership or support roles and from front line to more tactical and more strategic senior positions, following any number of paths into training, operational, technological, change, recruitment, financial, BD career paths. The list of branches is extensive.

They can earn enough to buy a house and a car and further their own personal growth and education, take their families on holidays, save money and even go out on their own and be their own success. Not bad for an agent with little to no skills some years before.

This agent to successful senior leader journey is commonplace in our industry. It is also the case that our industry now attracts leaders and innovators from other industries who want their career paths to lead into contact centres.

So YES! You can develop a lasting career in the contact centre industry.

It’s an industry still plagued by its own self made reputational issues and one which suffers from an imbalance where there is still a big enough minority of centres doing it badly enough to keep the public concerned.

That said, the majority of players are diligent and enthusiastically focused on being the best versions of themselves for their customers and this improvement continues.

Our industry is a more regulated, wiser and more exciting place to work than in the past and rightly is on the horizon of being able to say out loud, “Contact centres can offer lasting and impressive career journey’s”.

?

What do we still need to work on? Lots of stuff, but that’s for a different article.

The immediate focus for the industry now has to be the focus on workplace culture and the wider culture and values centred approach from recruitment all the way through to exit and everything in-between. The balance of off to on-shore is key for public confidence and the balance between automation and the human touch needs carefully developed.

Would I recommend the contact centre industry as a career? YES!

I was one of those agent to Senior leader career adventurers and I have everything to thank my industry for. I made it happen. I went through the mud and glue to get to the other side. I couldn’t have done this anywhere else in the same way.

My next mission as a leader in the industry is to champion the movement of contact centre career journeys being a very real thing in the UK. Not a stop gap and transient job culture for people, but a real long term career journey that attracts and keeps the finest minds under its roofs.

Are you with me?

Thanks for reading and as ever, please join in the debate and reach out to collaborate.

Al

#career #jobforlife #contactcentrecareer