I hope that’s got your attention, it was designed to, but it’s not a mistake and it’s something we need to recognise and understand to ensure our survival.
Understanding your purpose is fundamental to your success and over time the purpose of contact centres has changed, two things have driven that change:
1) Alternatives
2) Customers
Before I touch on the above I think it’s important to share what failure is and what it isn’t, this picture summaries it:
Since Covid there has been a more rapid acceleration towards customer self-sufficiency through self-service, but it has come at a cost to both customer and contact centre staff, it’s still “work in progress”.
Alternatives
Often processes and solutions are written from the company’s point of view and the technology required to support them has teething problems. Thus there is a need for the customer to make contact to achieve what they want.
This has led to the purpose of the contact centre changing, we recognise that there may be fewer contacts, but those that remain are more complex to deal with.
This has resulted in changes to both demand forecasts and handling expectations, the knock on is staff need greater ability than before and work may not be concluded in one touch.
These changes need to be incorporated in our planning, training and management approaches, failure to do so leaves the business susceptible to unexpected costs and bad customer feedback.
There is a note of caution, whilst it may be tempting to enable customers to circumnavigate the desired processes, doing so undermines the strategy and business planning.
Expectations of working in a contact centre have changed with a younger generation of staff, understanding this is as important as the changes to the demand they are expected to deal with. Where staff work is only one consideration, reward, recognition, occupancy, efficiency and tenure are all key things to get right in your strategy, planning and management. We have set our stall out to make working in a contact centre the start of a career, but is that ambition shared by our younger colleagues?
Customers
Like your staff, your customers are changing, expectation, ability and willingness to follow changes to process and how they interact with your business will never sit still. It’s apparent that many people will simply give up if their path meets too much resistance, but the younger generation may not even contact your staff even if you give them the option.
You may see a downturn in failure demand, but that may not signal greater success in the value demand.
Older customers often reject new methods before trying them, in this case failure demand may increase, but that’s not a signal to change, but to correct and refine.
Over time this trend will reverse as there are fewer of these customers remaining.
Conclusion
I hope you now understand the title of this post, I am not sating contact centres are a failure, simply they now deal with increased amounts of failure, but failure is inevitable and requires the right action to cure.
It’s important that you understand the contribution you make to any business and if that contribution changes it is not always to your detriment, unless you refuse to accept the change. Whilst we continue to refine the self-service processes and their technology there remains a great deal of value add for contact centres, but the tasks are not going to get easier and we will need to be on our front feet, not sitting back continually debating old topics and values.
One way to do this is to be a positive part of change, a function that enables rather than prevents, the eyes and ears of the business that wants to understand what failure is from a customer point of view. Data can give you absolute values and whilst you can measure them against targets it’s far better to understand variances first, then you can start with the most important or rewarding things first.
Contact centres still have a future, but “past performance is no guarantee of future results”.
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