Speakers Corner: Sabio shares industry insights with the Professional Planning Forum

Ahead of this year's Contact Centre Planning conference, Michael Andrews, Head of Sabio’s specialist Workforce Optimisation Practice talks about the contact centre industry's biggest challenges over the last 12 months and the key issues he expects the industry to be tackling over the next year. Michael also explains how WFO can improve customer experience across all channels.

What was the biggest challenge facing the contact centre industry in the last 12 months and how did they overcome it?

As the market slowed down over the last year we’ve seen increasing evidence that businesses are being pressured to make short term cost-focused decisions addressing key topics such as headcount reduction, outsourcing or the shelving of IT initiatives.

In reality, simple economics dictate that in many cases overall expenditure must be reduced however at Sabio, we have been encouraging organisations to focus their investment in improving customer satisfaction because customer centric businesses have been proven to better withstand recessionary pressure and will be better placed for the inevitable and very welcome upturn.

We haven’t overcome this challenge yet but remain optimistic that in next years’ Speakers Corner we will be discussing the challenges of exploiting economic recovery.

What are the key issues you expect the industry to be tackling in the next 12-18 months?

Businesses are going to spend a lot of time over the next 12-18 months gaining a better understanding of what their customers are thinking in order to differentiate from their competitors. The contact centre is the perfect channel to collect this information as it is a continuous source of customer contact and we’ll see an increase in customer feedback and speech analytics initiatives.

Contact centres will continue to seek the right balance between improving service delivery and managing cost and as a result, they will be paying increased attention to concepts such as Workforce Optimisation that are proven to help businesses do more with less.

We’re also expecting a lot of activity around PCI credit and debit card security as organisations suddenly realise that compliance with the PCI-DSS standard is essential if they’re to keep on processing card payments.

How can WFO improve customer experience across all channels while supporting and empowering employees?

It’s important that organisations offer a consistent customer experience across multiple channels, and we’ve certainly seen organisations that truly support multi-channel providing a more varied and enjoyable working environment for their agents.

When thinking about multi-channel, it’s also necessary for organisations to include their back-office operations, where whole teams of staff spend their time processing customer emails and scanned correspondence. Often this activity is conducted independent of WFM and Quality Monitoring programmes and we think there’s a real opportunity for businesses to follow the lead of organisations such as Thames Water, who have successfully integrated their front-office contact centre and back-office operations, unlocking significant operational savings and successfully increasing customer satisfaction supported by an integrated WFO approach.