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Celebrate 20 years of the Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit with us!

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A special 20th Anniversary Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit is taking place this April at the Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre London Heathrow – Register to attend today!

We’d love to fund your place which includes; a personalised itinerary of relaxed one-to-one meetings with companies that you pre-select, informative seminars, all meals and refreshments and an overnight stay, as well as great networking opportunities throughout.

And its complimentary to attend 😊

Author, Entrepreneur and International speaker Daniel Lewis is the proud founder of the award-winning tea company Daniel’s Chai bar, that has served the Royal Family.

He has won him and his company many awards such as the 2014 Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 2016 Business Excellence Award and 2017 Top 40 Under 40 Entrepreneurs, and just recently 2022 Global Visual Victories Silver Medal for most creative Pop-Up Store Design.

Daniel will be presenting: ‘THE ELEVATED EXPERIENCE: How to ROCKET LAUNCH your customer experience & your team at the same time!’

Introducing a 5 step framework that will teach you how to impact and improve the customer’s experience by elevating your culture and improving the atmosphere for your people first.

There will also be some added surprises throughout, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the event!

Book Here: https://contactcentresummit.co.uk/live/delegates-booking-form

If you specialise in Technology for contact centres we want to hear from you!

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Each month on Contact Centres Briefing we’re shining the spotlight on a different part of the customer care market – and in March we’re focusing on Technology.

It’s all part of our ‘Recommended’ editorial feature, designed to help customer care industry buyers find the best products and services available today.

So, if you’re a supplier of Technology solutions and would like to be included as part of this exciting new shop window, we’d love to hear from you – for more info, contact Mark Connell on m.connell@forumevents.co.uk.

Here are the areas we’ll be covering, month by month:

Mar – Call Centre Technology
Apr – Automated Customer Satisfaction
May – Social Media
Jun – Artificial Intelligence
Jul – Virtual Call/Contact Centres
Aug – Training & Development
Sep – Knowledge Management
Oct – Web Self Service/Chat
Nov – Display Boards
Dec – CRM
Jan – Agent Coaching & Monitoring
Feb – Analytics

For more information on any of the above, contact Mark Connell on m.connell@forumevents.co.uk.

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

ANALYTICS MONTH: Leveraging insights from AI and Ml while protecting privacy

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As businesses strive to enhance customer service, drive efficiency, and gain competitive advantage, the application of analytics within contact centres has become increasingly sophisticated. Here’s a look at the key trends shaping the use of analytics tools in the UK’s contact centre industry.

Real-time Analytics for Immediate Insights: One of the most significant trends is the shift towards real-time analytics. Contact centres are now leveraging tools that provide immediate insights into customer interactions as they happen. This real-time analysis allows agents to adapt their approach on the fly, resolving issues more efficiently and improving the customer experience. Real-time analytics also enable supervisors to monitor call quality and agent performance, intervening promptly when necessary.

Predictive Analytics for Enhanced Customer Experience: Predictive analytics is another trend gaining momentum. By analysing historical data, contact centers can predict future customer behaviour and trends. This predictive insight allows for more personalised customer interactions, as agents can anticipate needs and offer tailored solutions before the customer even articulates them. Predictive analytics also helps in optimising workforce management, ensuring that the right number of agents with the appropriate skills are available at peak times.

Speech and Text Analytics for Deeper Understanding: The application of speech and text analytics has revolutionised how contact centers interpret customer interactions. These tools analyse voice calls and written communications to identify sentiment, tone, and specific keywords, providing a deeper understanding of customer emotions and intentions. This analysis can uncover trends and issues that might not be apparent from numerical data alone, offering valuable insights that can inform service improvements and product development.

AI and Machine Learning for Smarter Analytics: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are at the forefront of the analytics revolution in contact centers. These technologies enhance the capabilities of analytics tools, enabling more sophisticated data analysis. AI and ML can identify patterns and correlations within large datasets that human analysts might miss, leading to more accurate predictions and actionable insights. Furthermore, these technologies can automate routine tasks, allowing agents to focus on more complex customer needs.

Data Security and Privacy Considerations: With the increased use of analytics tools, data security and privacy have become paramount concerns. Contact centers are investing in secure analytics platforms that comply with data protection regulations such as the GDPR. Ensuring the privacy and security of customer data is not only a legal requirement but also crucial for maintaining customer trust.

The application of analytics tools within the UK’s contact centres is evolving rapidly, driven by advances in real-time analytics, predictive analytics, speech and text analysis, AI, and ML. These trends are enabling contact centers to deliver a more personalised, efficient, and data-driven customer service experience. As these technologies continue to develop, their application in contact centres is set to become even more integral to achieving operational excellence and customer satisfaction.

Are you looking for Analytics tools for your contact centre business? The Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit can help!

Photo by Choong Deng Xiang on Unsplash

Zoom touts AI benefits for contact centres

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Zoom has announced new AI Companion capabilities that it says will help improve connection, productivity, and collaboration across the platform, with specific benefits for contact centres and agents.

Along with additional enhancements across Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Whiteboard, and Zoom Meetings, Zoom AI Companion, the company’s generative AI assistant that is included at no additional cost, can now help administrators track AI usage and adoption, and contact centers agents improve interactions with customers.

To help streamline the usage and adoption of AI Companion across an organisation, Zoom is introducing an analytics dashboard to help owners and admins gain a better understanding of how AI Companion is being used across their organisation and if more support is needed.

Zoom says AI has become a critical ingredient for many successful contact centres: AI Companion for Contact Center can now summarise customer chats and conversations to enable better agent understanding and smoother hand-offs, generate post-call tasks for follow-up, and support speech analytics and live sentiment.

In terms of productivity the AI Companion also offers agents:

  • Team Chat: When using Team Chat, AI Companion will detect intent to schedule a meeting and will generate a pop-up that, when clicked, opens a calendar invite pre-filled with attendees, as well as date and time information for users, all based on the message’s content.
  • Whiteboard: Users now have the ability to create mind maps within Zoom Whiteboard using AI Companion to help visually organise thoughts that stem from a central idea based on user prompts.

AI Companion will also use attendees’ gender pronouns from their Zoom profile when generating Meeting Summaries to help meeting participants feel seen and acknowledged.

“AI Companion has generated over 5 million meeting summaries since we launched it in September 2023,” said Mahesh Ram, head of AI at Zoom. “We are focused on building AI capabilities that support collaboration, connection, and productivity, and empower users to do their best work. By continuing to launch new features for AI Companion, including an analytics dashboard and AI Companion for Zoom Contact Center, our aim is to help more people feel supported and enabled to build connections together.”

CCaaS demand set to hit $17.8bn by end of the decade

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The Global Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) market is expected to generate $17.83 billion by the end of 2029, up from $4.73 billion in 2022.

The big prediction comes in a new report for ResearchAnMarkets, which says as businesses increasingly embrace digital technologies and channels, there’s a growing need to modernise their contact centre operations.

CCaaS solutions provide the flexibility to adapt to these changes, enabling businesses to meet customer expectations in a digital-first world.

During the forecast period, 2024-2029, Global Contact Centre as a Service is expected to expand at a CAGR of 19.28%. The growing population, as well as the growing urbanisation rate, are driving up the market.

CCaaS allows companies to scale their contact centre operations up or down easily. This flexibility is crucial in industries with fluctuating call volumes, such as retail during the holiday season or healthcare during a public health crisis. Traditional on-premises contact centre systems can be expensive to set up and maintain. CCaaS solutions eliminate the need for significant upfront investments and reduce ongoing operational costs. Organisations pay for the services they use on a subscription or pay-as-you-go basis.

The rise of remote work and hybrid work models, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has created a need for cloud-based communication solutions. CCaaS platforms enable agents to work from anywhere with an internet connection, ensuring business continuity and flexibility.

Integration capabilities are a crucial driver of the CCaaS market. CCaaS solutions can easily integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enabling agents to access customer data and history, resulting in more personalized interactions. CCaaS platforms are increasingly incorporating AI and automation to enhance customer service. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and predictive analytics can handle routine inquiries, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex tasks.

The Americas, comprising North, Central, Latin, and South America, represents a significant market for Contact Centre as a Service Offering. With increasing regulatory requirements around data security and privacy (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), CCaaS providers are enhancing their offerings to ensure compliance. This is particularly important for industries like healthcare and finance.

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Companies ‘must navigate challenges’ to ensure ethical deployment of AI solutions

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Generative AI has raised new challenges related to ‘Responsible AI’, catapulting concerns into the headlines and forcing enterprises to revisit their AI policies at a time when they investigate new potential applications.

Enterprises need to ensure that AI solutions are implemented in a responsible and ethical way, says GlobalData,  data and analytics company.

Responsible AI refers to the ideal that AI projects, whether based on predictive AI or generative AI, are deployed in a manner that safeguards privacy, does not cause harm, is as transparent as possible, is free from bias, and is fair to all that are impacted by them. The recent lawsuit filed by the New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement highlights the challenges our society faces in implementing AI in a responsible manner.

Rena Bhattacharyya, Chief Analyst of Enterprise Technology and Services at GlobalData, said: “Responsible AI has once again been catapulted into the headlines due to the emergence of Generative AI. The ease with which consumers can access Open AI’s ChatGPT has made the concerns posed by the new technology, such as hallucinations and data privacy, readily apparent and easily comprehendible to even casual users.”

GlobalData’s latest reports, “Generative AI Watch: Lessons Learned for Implementing Responsible AI (Part 1)” and “Generative AI Watch: Lessons Learned for Implementing Responsible AI (Part 2),” found that in addition to concerns related to copyright protections, enterprises must contend with issues related to explainability, bias,  ethics,  hallucinations, toxicity and poisoning,  and data privacy and leakage when implementing Responsible AI strategies.

Bhattacharyya concluded: “Challenges related to Responsible AI have existed for years, but they have grown in number with the launch of generative AI and have also become more pressing now. Organizations deploying AI must ensure that they are using the technology in a way that is responsible and ethical; otherwise, they risk significant damage to their brand reputation, if not legal and financial repercussions. It is a highly ambitious goal – and getting there is a daunting task.”

2024 Contact Centre Predictions: The intersection of brand, CX, and AI?

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As 2023 came to a close, a survey by Which? found that on average 20% of customers were unhappy with their most recent customer service interaction. Many leading consumer brands were found to be falling behind on basic service KPIs, with almost a quarter unhappy with how long it took to speak to someone who could help (23%) and how long it took to get an answer to their query (22%).

CX tech provider Avaya says the focus for 2024 will be on the impact contact centres have on CX and brand image – with AI innovation redefining CX and brand alignment. Here are their three trends to watch out for:

1.       AI to Enable the Experience Economy – Alan Masarek, CEO, Avaya
“With companies firmly in the ‘Experience Economy,’ where goods and services have been commoditised, and the customer experiences companies create will matter most, the focus in 2024 will be on innovating the customer experience to drive differentiation and growth. Brands are increasingly recognising that their contact centres are at the ‘tip of the spear’ for driving differentiating experiences for their customers, and AI-powered innovations will be front and centre to supercharge CX solutions.

If 2023 was about the ‘potential of AI,’ the dynamic will shift in 2024 to demonstrating how AI investments must translate directly and tangibly to driving tangible business value by contributing to top and bottom-line improvements and competitive advantage. And, because CEOs and Boards of Directors are increasingly focused on managing risk, privacy, security, and business ethics concerns associated with AI technology, 2024 will increasingly be a year where these issues come to the forefront.”

2.       CMO to Have an Increased Role in CX – Josh Mueller, CMO, Avaya
“In 2024, businesses will see the role of the CMO become more heavily entwined in the efforts to build stronger customer experience and interactions. In the contact centre, specifically, expect to see CMOs closer to the content delivered in the contact centre through campaign messaging, contact centre agent training, or hands-on roles in applying AI to call routing. In the coming year, CMOs will play an increasingly crucial role in the experiential side of customer interactions.”

3.       AI in the Contact Center – Omar Javaid, CPO, Avaya
“Over the next year, there will be two areas of focus for AI-powered innovation in the contact centre. The first will be using AI to delegate menial tasks away from contact centre agents, boosting overall productivity while allowing agents to focus on creating higher-quality customer experiences and driving greater agent job satisfaction and retention. The second will be on how AI and/or ML investments can help customers navigate to their desired resolution much quicker than any previous solutions have allowed, driving customer engagement, satisfaction, and, potentially, share of wallet revenue gains.”

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

AGENT COACHING MONTH: Top tips for choosing the right partner for your contact centres

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In the bustling world of contact centres, the performance and skill set of agents play a pivotal role in delivering exceptional customer service. As a senior contact centre professional, selecting the best agent coaching solutions is vital for nurturing a skilled and efficient team. Here are some top tips to guide you in making the right choice for your organisation…

  1. Identify Specific Needs and Goals: Before diving into the sea of available solutions, take a step back and assess the unique needs and objectives of your contact centre. Are you looking to improve specific skills like communication or problem-solving? Do you need to focus on product knowledge, or are soft skills the priority? Setting clear goals will help you choose a solution that aligns with your centre’s requirements.
  2. Look for Customisability and Flexibility: One size does not fit all in agent coaching. Opt for a solution that offers customisation to cater to the varied learning styles and needs of your agents. Flexibility in terms of content, delivery method, and pace is crucial for accommodating the diverse workforce in your contact centre.
  3. Evaluate Integration Capabilities: The chosen solution should seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, such as CRM software and call monitoring tools. Integration ensures that coaching is relevant and based on real-time performance data, making it more effective and efficient.
  4. Emphasise Interactive and Engaging Content: Engagement is key in learning. Solutions that offer interactive and engaging content, such as gamified learning modules or scenario-based training, can boost motivation and retention among agents.
  5. Prioritise Continuous Learning and Development: Look for solutions that encourage continuous learning rather than one-time training sessions. This could include features like regular knowledge refreshers, skill assessments, and ongoing feedback mechanisms.
  6. Consider Scalability: As your contact centre grows, your coaching needs will evolve. Choose a solution that can scale up effortlessly to accommodate additional agents or adapt to new training requirements.
  7. Insist on Robust Reporting and Analytics: Effective agent coaching relies heavily on data-driven insights. Solutions with robust reporting and analytics capabilities allow you to track progress, identify areas for improvement, and measure the impact of training on performance.
  8. Seek User-Friendly Interfaces: A solution is only as good as its usability. Opt for a user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate for both coaches and agents. A steep learning curve can be a significant barrier to adoption.
  9. Request Demonstrations and Trials: Before making a final decision, request demonstrations and engage in trial periods. This hands-on experience will give you a clearer understanding of how the solution fits into your existing operations and meets your requirements.
  10. Gather Agent Feedback: Ultimately, your agents are the end-users of these solutions. Involve them in the selection process by seeking their feedback on potential options. This not only ensures that the solution meets their needs but also fosters a sense of ownership and acceptance among the team.

In summary, selecting the right agent coaching solution requires a blend of clear goal-setting, consideration of customisability, system integration, engaging content, scalability, data-driven decision-making, and user feedback. By carefully evaluating these aspects, you can equip your contact centre with a powerful tool that enhances agent performance and drives customer service excellence.

Are you looking for Agent Coaching & Monitoring solutions for your contact centres? The Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit can help!

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Learn and meet new partners at the Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit

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April’s Contact Centre & Customer Services Summit will give you the opportunity to network with peers, meet 1-2-1 with leading industry suppliers and attend our educational seminar programme.

Would you and/or a colleague like a spot? Your place will be fully funded and booking only takes 5 minutes! – Secure your place here.

Author, Entrepreneur and International speaker Daniel Lewis is the proud founder of the award-winning tea company Daniel’s Chai bar, that has served the Royal Family.

He has won him and his company many awards such as the 2014 Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 2016 Business Excellence Award and 2017 Top 40 Under 40 Entrepreneurs, and just recently 2022 Global Visual Victories Silver Medal for most creative Pop-Up Store Design.

Daniel will be presenting: ‘THE ELEVATED EXPERIENCE: How to ROCKET LAUNCH your customer experience & your team at the same time!’

How to take the Customer’s Experience to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL!

Introducing a 5 step framework that will teach you how to impact and improve the customer’s experience by elevating your culture and improving the atmosphere for your people first.

Your free pass will also include:

🤝 A corporate itinerary of one-to-one meetings with solution providers
💭 A seat at our industry seminar sessions
💤 Overnight stay at the venue
🥂 A place at our networking dinner, with a showcase of entertainment
☕ All meals and refreshments throughout
👋 Networking breaks to make new connections in your field

There will also be some added surprises throughout the day and a half, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the event!

DATE: 29th to 30th April 2024

VENUE: Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre, London Heathrow

Book your free place here >>>

Access fantastic online courses for contact centre and customer experience professionals

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We have a wide selection of online courses tailored specifically for the contact centre sector, enabling you to both amass new skills and improve existing ones in 2024 and beyond – start learning today!

These are specially-curated online courses designed to help you and your team improve expertise and learn new things.

The Customer Services online learning bundle provides you with over 50 courses, which cover all areas of both professional and personal development:

  • Caring for Your Customers’ Needs Certification
  • Consumer Rights Awareness Certification
  • Customer Care Certification
  • Customer Retention Certification
  • Online Security Certification
  • Managing and Improving Customer Service Process Certification
  • Managing Emotions at Work Certification
  • Identity Theft Awareness Certification
  • Listening Skills Certification
  • Managing Teams Certification
  • Memory Enhancement Certification
  • Mentoring and Coaching Skills Certification
  • Mindful Listening Certification

And many more!

Find out more and purchase your ticket online here.

For just £99 (usually £149), you can share the courses with your colleagues over a 12-month period.

Additionally, there are a variety of bundles available on all spectrums;

  • Personal & Professional Development
  • Healthcare
  • Sports & Personal Development
  • Human Resources
  • Customer Services
  • Health & Safety
  • Education & Social Care Skills
  • Sales & Marketing
  • IT & Personal Development

Book your courses today and come out of this stronger and more skilled!