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European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards

ECCCSAs: 20 years in the making

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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It’s 20 years since the first edition of the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards was launched. The industry was in its relative infancy and the awards evening was a comparatively small affair.

These days the awards are not only the longest running in the European customer contact industry but they are the largest with 24 countries entering and 1,300 people attending the awards evening last year.

So much has changed

Since the turn of the century, the customer contact industry has grown from strength to strength responding to changes in consumer behaviour, digitisation and globalisation. These are just some of the things that have changed:

  • Employee well-being

There is nothing like a pandemic to bring employee well-being into focus. However, long before now the industry has been focused on looking after its people and in recent years recognising that if you look after your people, your people look after your customers. We’ve seen this playout through working environments with fantastic facilities such as gyms, childcare, coffee shops and inspiring breakout areas. As we go through 2020 the industry is supporting its teams more than ever with access to mental health programmes and by enabling people to work from home. It will be interesting to see how employee policies adapt to a more flexible working approach going forward.

  • Advances in technology

Where do you start when it comes to technology? The industry has come a long way in the last 20 years; from the ACD to cloud comms, from stand-alone systems to integrated solutions, increased focus on security and compliance, automation, AI and robotics, sophisticated monitoring and reporting, bolt-on’s, add-on’s, modules and training to support it all. The technology stack for customer interactions is now more complex and impressive than ever before.

  • Multiple channels of choice

Driven by the availability of digital platforms and intelligent technology, consumers now have many channels to choose from to interact with organisations. Voice has remained a key channel of choice despite predictions of its demise to email. Social platforms, messaging and webchat have grown in popularity amongst consumers and now the use of video in those interactions is starting to be seen.

  • Consumer behaviour

The internet has given consumers access to more information, to share stories more readily and as a result consumer behaviour has changed significantly. Consumers are better informed and able to make decisions on who to buy from and why, before an organisation is aware they were even in the running. Recent months have demonstrated how much the consumer is in control of how they use technology, who they want to buy from and why they buy.

  • Listening to customers

Recent experiences have taught us the importance of listening to customers and responding to their wants and needs. But even before then, organisations have been surveying and listening to customers for a few years to gather insights in order to make more informed decisions about improving the customer experience in order to retain customers, because we all know it’s cheaper to retain than to acquire.

  • Access to information

The amount of information that is gathered and stored through customer interactions has been growing. There is almost too much data now available, if that’s possible, and the pressure is on to make sense of it, to turn it into useable information that can drive decision making. With artificial intelligence now able to do just that, leaders in contact centres and customer experience will be well placed to start driving the strategic agenda of any organisation that sincerely puts the customer front and centre.

  • Regulation and compliance

It is no surprise that as the industry has evolved more compliance and regulation has been imposed to protect customers, employees and organisations. Whether it’s TPS, PCI DSS, GDPR, employment law, health and safety or workers rights, these important regulations have helped to secure a professional and safe place for those that work in and interact with the customer contact industry.

Looking back, the industry has come a long way. And some of these enhancements and innovations took place very recently – not just since the pandemic took hold. Before then, last year. Some of the projects that were undertaken before February 2020 prepared organisations for this year and those projects should be celebrated.

If you have a project or a team that you want to recognise for moving your organisation forward, then why not enter the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards. Enter here today.

Thank you for responding in a crisis

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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By the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards

2020 has seen a phenomenon that the world would never want to experience again. The coronavirus pandemic ripped through every country. Never has our industry seen so many people respond so quickly to a crisis.

The customer contact industry demonstrated just how agile and reactive it can be. Whole contact centre operations migrated to homeworking within days, home offices were created in the most unlikely places and customer service teams put their customers ahead of their own challenges.

Thanking your colleagues for what they did in responding to this crisis is not only the right thing to do but will give them a sense of pride in their job. The European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards realise that there are few opportunities to thank teams publicly, and so are delighted to give the industry the chance to enter five new categories this year.

Read on to find out more or visit www.ecccsa.com.

Responding to a Crisis – Supporting Customers

All forecasts and predictions on interaction volumes were challenged when the coronavirus hit. Some organisations saw a sharp decline in customer contact almost immediately. For others, customer interactions grew in epic proportions. Customers were anxious and emotional, and concerned about the present as well as the future.

As a result, contact centre and customer service operations had to quickly adapt their policies and processes, be more aware of customers’ individual circumstances and adjust their approach to quality to meet the needs of their customers.

Which team or teams in your business went above and beyond to support customers this year?

Responding to a Crisis – Supporting Colleagues

Much has been discussed about the mental wellbeing of colleagues during the pandemic, especially for those that have a total change in their work environment.

Many organisations were quick to support their colleagues through engagement programmes and individual teams have worked hard to support each other. You may have a team of people within your business who moved heaven and earth to make sure colleagues were supported – why don’t you thank them by nominating them for this award?

Responding to a Crisis – Providing Leadership

It was your leadership team that led how quickly and how well your organisation responded to the coronavirus. Although many people were in a state of shock at the start of the pandemic, leadership teams across Europe recognised the need to respond quickly and map a path to enable the business to continue to serve its customers.

You may be a member of that leadership team or you may have a team of leaders that you want to thank for their swift and clear action that gave reassurance to colleagues and customers. Why don’t you nominate them?

Responding to a Crisis – Supporting the Community

The coronavirus crisis brought the best out of many people. It was clear that there were some communities that desperately needed support to help them through this difficult time. Customer contact operations recognised that they could help and there are countless stories of teams of advisors being deployed into the community to provide services to those that needed it most. Here’s an opportunity to recognise and thank those teams.

Responding to a Crisis – Best Partnership Solution

Whether you’re a customer contact operation or a solution provider, if you worked together to implement a technology solution that enabled the operation to continue to service customers through the pandemic then you may want to thank the team involved. Working through the barriers, being responsive and working as a team would have been critical to enable operational continuity when everything else was changing. Here’s your chance to thank those that supported and delivered that transition.

Although the pandemic has been the biggest disaster to hit the world in a century, there are many examples of kindness, where humanity has broken through the storm. And it’s these acts that the ECCCSAs want to recognise, and that’s why this years’ programme is giving you a chance to thank those people that have gone above and beyond.

The awards are accepting nominations right now until the end of August. You can take advantage of an early bird offer if you commit to entering before the end of June and you can still edit your entry until the deadline.

There is support available through the website www.ecccsa.com and this Friday you can join a webinar with the Chair of the Judges, Ann-Marie Stagg, and the Head of Operations, Jackie Pringle.

Register for the webinar here: https://www.ecccsa.com/webinar/