Insights from 20 meetings in 2 days with contact centre stakeholders

In theory every salesman dream meeting decision makers and influencers who are in the market to investigate or invest. Aside from some great meetings and some where you had wished we had met 6 months earlier. My three key takeaways were:

Cloud Adoption

SaaS is adopted strongly for CRM and Microsoft suite but many still invest in contact centre platforms via on premise. The larger businesses that have taken this route still seem to be experiencing long deployment times without full functionality day one.

Salesforce is popular which should not be a surprise, but it is also taking email and web chat as a channel into contact centres for some. 80% of the people I spoke to had or were about to adopt it. all of those that had already felt they had not made the most of its capability due to poor deployment. They often forgotten factor of using salesforce for email and chat routing is providing multi-channel but neglecting the benefits of Omni channel. Being able to report and route on one platform seems to be a lost productivity opportunity for agents in my humble opinion which leads on to the challenges with work force management. (WFM)

Optimising the Work force

The next big topic was WFM in the 50-200 agent space adoption has been cost prohibitive in the past. The gains to improving agent’s proficiency, scheduling and analytics. In particular I heard a demand for speech recognition to understand the voice of the customer. Ironically these technologies have never been so obtainable for smaller contact centres through cloud SaaS models. Yet as mentioned earlier business continue to adopt on premise voice contact centre platforms and use crm to handle vanilla email and chat channels. This is leading to multi-vendor technology adoption. Which has two significant downsides cost and complexity. In my experience medium to long term to keep a multivendor solution working in harmony is both a challenge technically and from user experience.

BOT's and Social

Neither new concepts but still seem to be challenge for contact centres broader strategies. I heard more than once from line of business people saying my C-level want a bot. When challenged for the use case it appeared with amusement that they did not know, but the boss wanted one. Social/ digital channels while higher on the agenda still seems to be an enigma. As ownership of Facebook and Twitter still has a heavy marketing team influence. Due to lack of wider channels in existence in side businesses today the demand is unquantifiable. Resulting in less strategic thinking about how business can differentiate by offering customers wider amounts of channel choice. Or the benefits cost wise to dealing with customers on channels like SMS, iMessage, FB messenger, WhatsApp etc versus voice, email and real time web chat.

Great two days and while every Contact Centre is different it was a great snap shot of current market.