Tag: digital transformation

Business, Collaborating, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, productivity

When is a Contact Centre, NOT a Contact Centre

Imagine asking 100 people to describe a Contact Centre. Most would likely envision a bustling office space with employees wearing headsets, sitting in front of computers, and handling phone calls. This common perception, however, limits our understanding of what a contact center truly is and inadvertently excludes other businesses from recognizing themselves as part of this ecosystem.

Yet, there’s a missed opportunity in this narrow perspective. Consider the remarkable advancements in Contact Center Technology.

Technology evolves rapidly, often leaving us struggling to keep up. Just think about the capabilities packed into your latest iPhone or Android device—it’s more powerful than the technology that once took us to the moon.

The ongoing technology revolution brings both complexity and immense capability. Unfortunately, the terminology itself sometimes leads to exclusion, preventing businesses from realizing the substantial benefits available.

Consider this scenario: A business leader or owner dismisses the idea of using contact center technology because their company doesn’t fit the traditional contact center mold.

Remember, every business relies on customers for survival. These very customers interact with your business, reaching out and receiving responses. Are you following so far? Excellent.

These customers are part of the same ever-changing cycle as we are. They, too, embrace technological shifts. Moreover, consider how the demographics of your customer base influence the transition from “real-time live voice” conversations to more digital, near-real-time, or asynchronous interactions—think WhatsApp and similar channels.

Ignore these changes at your peril, because we all know that customers will vote with their feet if you are not able to offer them the flexibility and choice that they demand of us.

This is not about Tech for Tech sake, but embracing the inevitable change that is happening with or without us. 

A word of caution, however. Do make sure that you plan this well and consider the fallout should you get this wrong. And some of the wrongest (I know, but it felt right to use the word) implementations are from some of the largest companies on the planet – why – I can only surmise that they feel they CAN, because they are the 400lb gorilla – but we all know they are wrong don’t we.

So my advice would be to dip your toe in the water and introduce these emerging DIGITAL channels into your NON-CONTACT CENTRE businesses and do it well. Making sure that you are not building them in siloes, but doing it in a joined up and connected way (Omnichannel) that keeps real people at the heart of the changes – your staff and your customers. 

Equally I would also investigate how AUTOMATION can better serve your customers – including Artificial Intelligence solutions using Generative AI. Although there is a place for less sophistication for some interactions 

Want some help and advice – just ask. I don’t bite, even as a Leicester Tigers 🐯supporter 😜

Business, Customer Experience

Evolving Beyond the Contact Centre:

Embracing Omnichannel Customer Engagement

In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, the way businesses interact with their customers has undergone a remarkable transformation.

Gone are the days when a “contact centre” referred solely to a physical location where customers made phone calls for support or inquiries. The advent of technology and the rise of multiple communication channels have rendered the term “contact centre” somewhat outdated. Instead, we now find ourselves in an era of omnichannel customer engagement, where businesses must adapt to effectively cater to customers across various platforms. In this blog post, we will explore the evolving nature of customer interactions and the need to embrace a more comprehensive approach to customer engagement.

Old style telephony operators ~1950
Just logging on

The Expanding Horizon of Customer Engagement: 

In the past, businesses primarily relied on telephone communication to handle customer interactions. The term “contact centre” emerged to describe a centralised hub where agents managed incoming and outgoing phone calls. However, the rise of digital channels, such as email, chat, social media, and messaging apps, has expanded the scope of customer engagement beyond traditional telephony. Customers now expect seamless experiences across multiple channels, demanding prompt responses and personalized interactions.

The Limitations of the Traditional Contact Centre Model: 

The traditional contact centre model, designed primarily for voice-based interactions, falls short in meeting the demands of modern customers. Relying solely on phone calls limits the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service operations. Customers may prefer different channels based on their preferences, urgency, or the complexity of their issues. Failing to provide a cohesive and consistent experience across all channels can lead to frustration, dissatisfaction, and potentially losing customers to competitors who prioritize omnichannel engagement.

Embracing Omnichannel Customer Engagement: 

To adapt to the evolving landscape of customer interactions, businesses must embrace omnichannel customer engagement. This approach focuses on seamlessly integrating all customer touchpoints, whether through phone calls, emails, live chats, social media, or any other relevant communication channel. By doing so, companies can provide a unified and consistent experience across platforms, ensuring that customers receive the same level of support and engagement regardless of the channel they choose.

Benefits of Omnichannel Customer Engagement:

  1. Enhanced Customer Experience: Omnichannel engagement allows businesses to provide a more personalized, convenient, and consistent experience to their customers. Customers can effortlessly transition between channels while maintaining the context of their interactions, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
  2. Improved Efficiency and Productivity: By leveraging the power of automation, artificial intelligence, and unified customer data, businesses can streamline their customer service processes. Agents can access comprehensive customer information across channels, enabling them to resolve issues faster, reduce handling times, and ultimately increase productivity.
  3. Deeper Customer Insights: An omnichannel approach enables businesses to gather valuable data and insights about customer preferences, behaviours, and pain points. These insights can be leveraged to develop more targeted marketing strategies, refine products and services, and identify opportunities for improvement.
  4. Competitive Advantage: Embracing omnichannel customer engagement is becoming increasingly crucial in a highly competitive market. Businesses that prioritize seamless interactions across channels differentiate themselves, attract and retain more customers, and build a strong brand reputation.

The term “contact centre” perhaps no longer encapsulates the breadth and depth of customer engagement in today’s business landscape. To meet the expectations of modern customers, companies must evolve beyond the limitations of a single-channel approach and embrace omnichannel customer engagement. By seamlessly integrating various communication channels, businesses can deliver a superior customer experience, drive efficiency, gain valuable insights, and gain a competitive edge. The future of customer engagement lies in the ability to adapt and cater to customers wherever they are, on whichever channel they prefer.

This also means that for many organisations, a shift in thinking from:

“We don’t have a contact centre”, to:

“Yes, we absolutely engage with customers across many different channels and need to embrace technology to ensure we meet the customers’ needs and expectations”.

Business, channel, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, partnership, productivity

Trust Business Partners and INOVO Partnership

Trust Business Partners and INOVO Partnership

London, 16h February 2020 – Trust Business Partners today announced that it has expanded its strategic partnerships through a new agreement with INOVO, who provide the tech and ongoing optimisation to boost contact centre efficiency, productivity and CX.

Trust Business Partners will be the face of INOVO in UKI & Europe, representing the brand through sales and marketing activity, recruiting new channel partners, systems integrators and creating local European strategic alliances. Trust Business Partners has over 30 years’ experience in the UKI & European contact centre space working directly with customers and partner channels.

INOVO is a cloud contact centre solutions provider that focuses on delivering business results rather than just enablement. The company devotes a dedicated team of industry specialists to every customer account to drive continuous improvements in efficiency, productivity and CX. INOVO’s clients vary from 10 to a few thousand seats across several sectors such as: financial services, retail, telecoms, healthcare, BPO, hospitality and travel.

INOVO was established in 2006 after a group of experienced contact centre specialists joined forces to disrupt the contact centre market. By adopting a “partner” over “vendor” approach, the goal was to deliver business services that extended beyond just providing great technology, and really focused on understanding, and meeting a customer’s unique requirements.

“Our success has stemmed from our ability to identify specific business challenges and use cases and be innovative in how we help businesses solve them. We look at a business holistically – whether it’s the underlying processes or the tech – and work with our customers to continually drive improvements. We’re looking forward to working with Trust Business Partners to help deliver this kind of business value to contact centres in UKI and throughout Europe,” said Wynand Smit, CEO and founding partner of INOVO

“Customers today demand well-informed and intelligent business conversations around technology and processes to enhance their contact centre and customer experience. INOVO’s ability to enhance services while improving time to resolution and reducing costs will be very attractive for partner channels seeking to grow additional revenue streams and service customers better. We believe that with this partnership, customers and partners in UKI & Europe will be able to differentiate themselves significantly with INOVO’s unique offer.” said David Pitts, Founder Partner at Trust Business Partners

About INOVO

INOVO is a cloud contact centre solutions provider that focuses on delivering business results rather than just enablement. The company devotes a dedicated team of industry specialists to every customer account to drive continuous improvements in efficiency, productivity and CX. INOVO’s clients vary from 10 to a few thousand seats across several sectors such as: financial services, retail, telecoms, healthcare, BPO, hospitality and travel. For more information, visit https://www.inovo.co.za.

About Trust Business Partners

Trust Business Partners are a niche consultancy specialising in supporting IT/Voice/Software vendors and suppliers go to market strategy in the UKI & Europe. David Pitts and Graham Bunting’s (founding partners) experience of local markets is second to none having worked at partner, distributor and vendor level plus running their own successful businesses.

To grow your business, we’re committed to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. Simplification, communication and localisation provide a clear advantage in any market. We’re the company you can trust to help you deliver Experiences that Matter to your channels and customers.

Business, Customer Experience, Customer Focus

STOP You’re doing it all wrong

How many of us have used a chatbot on a website when we felt it might be quicker than waiting in the call queue, or in some cases where you just could NOT find a phone number anywhere to call!?

But it was an unmitigated disaster!

The BOT was more of a NOT as it didn’t seem to understand what you were asking for!

Next stop was SOCIAL MEDIA- RIGHT. Facebook and Twitter, and this time a very different experience. But still shocking. You’ve reached the corporate marketing team and they can’t help you with your query, but instead suggest you use the website (doh), or call the Contact Centre.

So far, you’ve got absolutely nowhere and your patience is dwindling….

Thankfully there are genuinely joined up and intelligent solutions available and the “no code” cloud offering from Koopid can be set up, and built in a few days. Critically ALL CHANNELS are orchestrated for a single uninterrupted conversation INCLUDING real agents and with chat persistence.

No more repetition

No more, please dial this number

No more “The Computer Says No”

It’s time to transform your customer experience journeys and remove the barriers to customer intimacy

Go on, ask me to show you, and I’ll be delighted

Can we talk?
Business

If you’re implementing bots to reduce your call volumes, then you’re starting from wrong place

I often observe a wry smile or perhaps a small sneer appear on people faces when I mention the words “chat and chatbots”, and I reckon this is because they have been around long enough now for most of us to have encountered one on a website, and unfortunately most of those experiences have been what I would call SUBOPTIMAL. 

From my perspective this boils down to a bunch of reasons, and a summary list is here to share my viewpoint:

  • Poor implementation.
  • Poor understanding of the customer requirements.
  • Poor technology – often free or low cost DIY.
  • Lack of any integration into business process or workflows.
  • Very binary bot – with zero intelligence. 
  • Business driver is to reduce call volumes to the call centre. 

For me, the right place to be starting, is with an understanding of the customer you serve, and their communication and engagement preferences.

For many of your customers, they will wish to call you, and if there is a queue, some will be ok waiting briefly. For many others, they will not have the patience, and will quickly seek an alternative. So injecting a digital/self-serve option, in the early part of the calling options is a good idea. 

Other groups within your customer base will wish to find a digital engagement option first, and so offering them an INTELLIGENT chat option on the website, as well as via commonly used social channels, is a must. We see huge growth in WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and webchat interactions, as customers seek rapid responses and resolutions, without the need to sit in a call queue. Often there is a resistance to even speaking with someone!

Moreover, customers dislike getting stuck, or isolated on a channel

… and this is where the first generation of dumb chatbots has failed. Should the digital channel hit a snag, then the ability to route the customer immediately to a live agent (critically with the context of the interaction to that point also), is pure gold. Nothing less is acceptable.

So don’t worry if your first generation chatbots are failing, but DO TAKE ACTION and ensure your customers are having the kind of experiences you would want, and you would want them to have.
Unsure how – then drop me a message or call me – you’ll find me here: https://grahambunting.com/findme/

Business, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, productivity

Automation, bots and more

We have all experienced web chatbots havent we? How was your experience?

The thing about automation and Digital Channel engagement, is that it needs to be well thought out and implemented carefully – too often it seems like a knee-jerk reaction and tactically deployed and siloed from other customer-facing areas of the business. For example, a twitter account, or Facebook account are set up and the marketing teams engage with customers driving news, promotions and the like, but when customers reach in through that “window” for help, they are left frustrated and alienated because the social team are “unable to help”…. never a good look is it.

A much better solution is to create a unified engagement experience – built on a “universal engagement” platform that allows an experience to be created once and deployed on any digital channel available, allowing customers to choose their route into your business, and to always receive the same high quality conversations – including self-serving where appropriate. So whether this is WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram or SMS, the experience can easily be deployed.

Not stranded

When the self-service attempts fail – and they will on occasions, because the customer might be after something you had yet to consider they might need, your customer needs to be carefully handed over from automation, to a human agent ALONG WITH THE CONVERSATION TO THAT POINT, so they do not feel frustrated, abandoned or marginalised.

Imagine the response from a customer when the agent engages and knows, not only who they are, but also understand their journey to that point.

Business, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, productivity, Social

Contact Centres – YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK, GOODBYE

Contact Centres – YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK, GOODBYE

Change or die is the message here. Progress means change is inevitable, yet we often see reluctance from business in this regard.

Changing gradually, is more of an evolutionary path and generally means a less bumpy and more controlled transition.

Change for the sake of change is questionable, however, change because your customers are demanding it is smart and clearly demonstrates customer-centric behaviours. It says “we are listening, and we are implementing the services you’re telling us are important to you”

A business’s inability to evolve generally results in frustrated customers, and ultimately customer defections.

It does increasingly feel like businesses make it difficult for you to contact them, doesn’t it, and although many of them are embracing digital channels like social media to broadcast their marketing messages. Ironically, this opens up new channels for customers and, yet those same organisations have so far failed to embrace the two-way nature of the communication that it enables. Broadly speaking, this is because these have become siloes that are unconnected, and unregulated, and staffed by unprepared team members.

There is no excuse for this, because the technology to rapidly deploy a connected omni-channel solution is available today. And to meet customers on their chosen channel without needing to rip and replace existing investment can be in place within days.

Business

When technology fails

Frustration with technology

It’s interesting isn’t it how we all have a different perspective concerning technology and its role in work life especially when it comes to interacting with people.
For example there’s a lot of friction caused by technology in the contact centre world, as customers generally hate queueing and certainly dislike a lot of the queueing technology, music and repetitive queue messages.

Too much friction and frustration.

It’s probably fair to say that technology is often blamed but is actually rarely at the root, as most often it’s how the technology is implemented and whether it’s a good fit for the problem that you’re trying to solve that is actually the cause.
One high priority action I’d strongly advise is to listen to your customers and examine their behaviour, and this will inform your technology choices to some degree.
Don’t be too quick to blame the technology but certainly do review regularly and take the pulse of your customers regularly. Technology evolves very quickly as do people’s adoption rates and being easy to do business with is a Critical Success Factor for you, and should certainly be one of the key measures you keep your eye on.

Business

Pinch Punch it’s December 1st

Here we are again, another month has passed and my creative juices have been at work to continue the story of Covid, lockdown and customer experience around the Contact Centre. Enjoy and let me know your thoughts

Pinch Punch it’s the first of the month https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHxLBXE1fy5FfhPyTfybsUBBCk68Dv1YK

Pinch punch it’s December the First,

The government and COVID is equally cursed.

We’re done with this now and we’re ready to leave.

Not talking about Brexit, It’s the year we want to heave.

I’m a positive guy with barely an occasional dip,

but this year’s challenged us all.

It’s got right on our pip.

The workplaces are our homes – Our kitchens good Lord

Our lounges and even the ironing board.

For many, this mode is totally sustainable.

For others, it’s completely replaceable.

There’s a strong desire for getting back to the office,

but it’s not for everyone coVid has taught us.

There is a place in our lives for the traditional workplace.

It’s valued and important to meet face to face

We’re social, you see, and it gives us a lift.

To meet our colleagues and partners is a gift.

Interaction with businesses has not been easy.

They’ve struggled too with staff shortages we see.

The older technology that’s not in the cloud

has limited the business and remote working has been disallowed

A tactical fix needed but meeting strategic intent,

A shrug of the shoulders from most seeking to augment

The voice only services with some messaging adjacent

With the former established and the latter just nascent.

Bringing all elegantly together is what’s required

An intelligent solution to enhance should be hired,

Helping to avoid call queues, where customers self serve

Shows significant demand and a hockey stick curve.

This AI technology is proven but new,

Needed by many, but so far adopted by few.

The mass adoption is on the way now.

Adopting is quite easy as Koopid shows you how

Koopid Ai has an impressive heritage to shout about 

with “firsts” and patents to allay all doubt.

But enough of the boasts and positive chat.

We’re ready to help you, that’s where we’re at.