The BPO industry emerged and grew over the 80s, 90’s and 2000s primarily as a means for organisations to reduce costs through labour arbitrage. Contact centres and customer service were seen as ideal targets to have someone else manage these functions, whether locally or overseas. Technology and the pandemic have greatly impacted the BPO industry …
The demand for self-service is understandable. Self-service delivers a range of benefits to businesses and customers alike, including reduced costs and higher customer satisfaction. However, while self-service solutions can deliver major benefits, live voice and chat interactions should not be left behind. They are still an important part of customer service, needing support and investment …
High quality customer service has always been the hidden hero driving company profits. Yet, delivering excellent customer experience (CX) at the business-to-business (B2B) level is much more complex than B2C. Often it involves multiple decision-making parties and significantly higher value or volume of purchases per customer over a lifetime. Changing a vendor is a significant …
Since the pandemic, most contact centres have implemented a hybrid working model. And according to research by Observe.ai, the majority (54%) envisage they’ll continue to operate on a hybrid model in future. Embracing a hybrid work model delivers a range of benefits for contact centres. The improved agility makes it easy to add additional agents to …
Organisations are using conversational AI to relieve the pressure on their contact centres while at the same time aiming to improve productivity and service levels. In the past, the performance of chatbots has been somewhat poor and the results disappointing. In recent years, however, AI technology has come a long way and some organisations at …
It has become accepted wisdom in the CX community for brands to delight or ‘wow’ their customers. But the truth is, delighting your customers may not necessarily build loyalty or raise revenue. That’s not to say that the effort to delight is useless but you need to get a few things right first. David Lucy, …
Customers use a variety of channels to interact with organisations to purchase the goods and services they want. They expect their experience when dealing with a brand to be seamless and personalised to their needs. The biggest challenges brands face in delivering seamless omnichannel customer experiences are internal silos and disconnected customer journeys, according to …
The last two years have handed many customer-facing organisations multiple curveballs in meeting expectations and providing a great customer experience (CX). But the ongoing misdirected outrage at the contact centre for not having expectations met is unwarranted and frankly outrageous. So I’m calling time out on the undeserved bad reputation of the contact centre, and …
Spurred on by the need to work remotely during the pandemic, the growth in hybrid work environments is expected to be a continuing trend. But in terms of maintaining employee engagement and productivity, a workplace environment that mixes in-office and remote work presents a range of unique challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many workers and firms to trial working from home. …
For many organisations, their contact centre operations and the people who work in them were at the frontline of supporting customers during the COVID-19 crisis. Customer demands on communication channels and services dramatically increased at the same as people had to work from home. The Auscontact Association played a critical role in supporting the industry …