Not Just a Contact Center?

A perfect storm is brewing at contact centers worldwide. With high interaction volumes and rising customer expectations, there is huge pressure to deliver outstanding service. At the same, COVID-19's “Great Resignation” and staff burnout have resulted in increased attrition and made it harder to recruit.

While companies are rapidly rolling out technology to close the gap and keep up, we expect a more fundamental trend will occur: Contact centers will transform into CX talent hubs. These centers of excellence will develop to provide exciting career paths, attract top talent, and spur organizational growth.

From jobs to careers

Businesses at the leading edge of customer experience understand the organizational value their staff delivers, and appreciate how the work of CX is becoming more challenging and technical. They’re taking a long-term view of talent, focusing on learning and development and cultivating career paths to attract and retain high performers.

In this new model, CX employees are increasingly tasked with using insights to solve problems. They develop deep knowledge of the customer and how organizational processes affect satisfaction. These highly qualified agents are involved in the design of technology solutions that support their workflows and deliver critical insights. This enables them to provide empathy in the moment and handle complex inquiries — without the need to escalate.

Building a lifetime value center

Companies will build an empowered and empathetic workforce by equipping employees with the skills to deliver superior CX atop a technology framework that removes tension from their daily responsibilities and provides them with relevant customer insights. In enabling staff to develop a career-building skill set, they’ll transform the contact center into a lifetime value center — a place that increases the lifetime value of customers and employees alike.

In this shift towards the new lifetime value center, businesses will learn what agents value most. And they’ll align their rewards, compensation, and daily responsibilities with those values. In addition, they’ll provide ongoing training, coaching, and cross-functional projects that develop soft skills and technical expertise.

Cementing the lifetime value center approach will also involve using employees to develop and implement technology for improving the customer’s experience, and their own. AI will assist with real-time insights and predictions, and intelligently route calls to the most appropriate staff member. Automation will reduce administration and manage routine tasks.

As a result of these shifts, the lifetime value center will:

• Grow in-demand skills such as design thinking and journey mapping
• Support on-premises and remote agents, while expanding the use of gig workers
• Create a continuous learning environment designed for career advancement
• Improve compensation, including performance-based bonuses

These changes will ultimately affect more than the contact center itself. In its evolution to a CX talent hub, the new contact center will arm agents with real-time insights and collaborative platforms for activating broad changes across the enterprise. In becoming true advocates for the customer, CX staff will grow the topline and pinpoint areas of ongoing frustration. As CX becomes an organizational strength, CX employees will gain recognition and advance their careers. And the most impactful transformation will happen in a cohesive enterprise where everyone works toward the same goal: elevating CX and impacting the bottom line.

This Omdia article originally appeared as a blogpost on the Genesys website.