The Six Most Important Lessons of 2022 for Contact Center Success
It is the time of year when it is fun - and essential! - to take a few minutes to reflect on the year gone by.
Smart leaders know it is equally important to acknowledge the successes and to evaluate the year’s misses to set the path for the new year.
From a Blue Orbit perspective, we had a lot of firsts this year, and have even more planned for next year that I look forward to sharing with you.
Our client’s successes - and the problems we needed to solve - have a lot to teach ALL of us in the world of customer experience and contact centers about what we will face in the months ahead.
In the meantime, here are a few of the most important headlines for 2023 that build off the themes we have seen over and over in 2022.
1. Technology Alone Is Not the Answer
Self-service is not the only solution to the labor shortage, nor is technology the only answer to reducing cost to serve.
Don’t get me wrong; technology is a key building block, but it is only one tool in the whole kit. Savvy organizations recognize that technology alone is not the answer.
During 2022, many organizations realized that without also considering the process and people angles, technology did not drive the desired results.
Contact Center success comes from the appropriate updates to ALL THREE ELEMENTS of the Customer Service Trilogy:
- Platforms
- People
- Process
Another way to think of this triad is technology, labor, and culture. We need the right technology or software platforms to do the job: the tools. We need the right training and support so your people can use the tools. We need the right culture and enablement for your best people.
The big news in 2022? Your old friend Outsourcing is back and also brand new again: on-shoring, near-shoring or off-shoring. The 2022 version of outsourcing, also known as business process outsourcing (BPO), has an array of benefits in the right situations and can be blended with any operation with an understanding of its calls, needs, processes, and tools.
Plus, BPOs can share incredible insights that your own people often miss. They offer an external perspective, having worked with so many different operations. Your own people sometimes see only one.
2. Holistic Experiences Win the Day
Easy to say, hard to do. It is also not a new idea.
What is new is the consideration of employee enablement as a large piece of the equation. Once you let go of technology as the only answer, the world of solutions opens for the other pieces of the trinity: people and process.
We see the biggest gains (always) when we focus on what it takes to make it easy for employees and customers. It is meeting the customer where and when they are amped up. Forrester has taken to calling this phenomenon Human Experience (HX) – a big term for a critically big idea.
3. Workplace Culture Trumps Servicing Strategy Every Time
The majority of clients we worked with this year struggled with delivering for their customers. The roadmap for success in every case included a critical culture component, whether it was readjusting to a new environment, implementing new technology, or just general malaise.
Time and again, we saw lack of focus - or blind spots - in terms of all the implications of the changes that had already been made. These blind spots made achieving significant results so much harder than it had to be.
It is not just a process or new technology. Change management is a discipline that extends beyond communication to establish and reinforce new norms.
This year will be the one when organizations look at the individual pieces and figure out how to make the sum of the parts greater. Smart leaders will truly take the time to understand what their people and their customers want and need, and align them. Others who ignore this dynamic reality will continue to pay the consequences, falling further and further behind.
4. Customers Are Not Getting More Patient…or More Civil
There has been a barrage of press lately about the incredible demise of both patience and civility in the workplace and in retail environments.
For those in service organizations, whether healthcare, food, or customer service, being on the frontline can be an uncomfortable place. Supporting frontline employees with the right tools and culture, along with recognizing that customers have a lower tolerance than ever for waiting, begs some rethinking about how to provide the right support at the right time.
You can never make everyone happy, but you can offer a variety of channels and options to raise the boiling point. Service level and speed to serve will regain ground as some of the most critical metrics.
5. Innovative Training and Knowledge Solutions Move Front and Center
Employee retention is key to so many things in an organization.
Employee competence and empowerment drives customer experience. Employee feelings of recognition, satisfaction, and commitment drive culture and workplace vibes.
One of the most basic customer service elements has been long ignored and underinvested in consistently. Can you guess what that is before you continue reading?
It is training and knowledge management.
In 2020 and 2021, most training was simply moved in format from the classroom to a video call.
In 2022, teams realized this switch was simply not creating equal results. Learning and development teams on the cutting edge are designing new models that combine classroom, self-paced, 1:1, and on-the-job experiences to build competency and relationships.
When combined with effective knowledge management, this is an on-ramp for creating great employee and customer experiences.
6. If You Are Not Automating Rote Work, You Need to Catch Up
When it comes to streamlining work, using tools like speech recognition and analysis and robotic process automation (RPA) are critical aspects of any customer serving organization.
Speech analytics allow visibility into what is going on during 100% of transactions – not a sample or just certain calls. All of them. And not just for quality assurance and coaching agents; for strategic insight as to why customers are calling and how those calls are handled so that organizations can use human resources to interpret data and set a strategy that customers will love.
This is too powerful to pass up.
Yes, it is an investment of resources.
Yes, it takes time to tune how it works.
The payoff from automation of rote work, however, is real. And it is big. Same goes for RPA. Looking at any situation where there is manual work or duplicative information being transferred from one format or system to another is a candidate. RPA is not about eliminating people. It is about freeing up people to do the work humans really have to do.
These are the lessons that the smartest customer experience/customer service leaders learned in 2022. These lessons are the most important notes to take us into real, and often dramatic, contact center solutions for 2023.
Whether your team’s situation is basic, hard, or ridiculously complex, solutions are out there.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges.
Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience.
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I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.