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New decade new contact centre - the death of voice in the contact centre

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19^th January 2010

New decade new contact centre - read the article on the death of voice in the contact centre by Faraz Khan, Managing Director, Protocall One.

A survey of contact centre operations directors that we ran late last year came up with the interesting finding that 82% of them thought that voice would cease to be the dominant communications channel in their contact centres within the next three years. So that is four out of every five people in charge of running what used to be called call centres, think voice calls will represent a minority channel by 2014.

So are we talking about the imminent death of voice in contact centres? It is certainly becoming clear that contact centres are seeing the potential of multi-channel communications - SMS, Web Chat, email and other non-voice modes of communication. Non-voice also takes in the increasing trend for callers to interact with Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) systems, often supported by speech recognition technology, which now handles many of the more routine caller requests - if you request a bank balance or to give an electricity meter reading.

The challenge and opportunities implied by this impending change cannot be underestimated. Not least of these is the need for up skilling of agents so they can handle multiple contact channels: our survey found that 75% of ops directors were struggling to find agents capable of writing clear and well constructed emails as they gear up to respond to the growing volume of customer emails.

But perhaps more interestingly, where multi-channel comms has been deployed, according to Contact Babel, contact centres have found it much easier to retain staff. 'Agent attrition', as it is called, fell by over half from 27% to 13% where moves have been made into multi-channel comms. So there is a distinct correlation between the skills required for the job in the contact centre and retention of staff and it is not simply because they are paying more for more skilled individuals. The same Contact Babel 2009 study shows average agent annual salaries increasing by just £800 last year.

So what is going on here? Could it be that contact centres are becoming more interesting places to work and that multi-channel communications combined with more 'self-service' deployments (for handling the more routine call queries) are the key elements in making this happen? We think so.

Investment in multi-channel certainly must be attracting 'Generation Y' into more agent jobs. After all this generation is much more attuned to interacting via text, email, social media and even in virtual world sites like Second Life rather than racking up their parents' phone bills. It is clear that contact centre heads are gradually recognising that many customers prefer to pick up the phone only if they are really stuck and cannot resolve their query via the web.

So what is the future of voice in contact centres in the new decade? We think it will not only become a minority channel but it will have to change quite radically. It will become, as it is already for many, the channel of last resort for more complex queries or complaints which require long explanation either by the customer or agent or both. Agents will need to be real specialists in particular offerings. They may also need more power to make decisions to improve the customers' situation - acting as advisers as much as resolution providers. Call success will need to be evaluated based on whether the caller got the information and was able to resolve an issue during that call. More granularity will be needed around call resolution reporting. Average call handling times and other, so called, 'efficiency' measures will cease to be as relevant as contact centres focus on delivering great customer service to protect and stimulate brand loyalty much more powerfully than they are able to do today. The twin revolutions of multi-channel and self-service together offer a bright future for contact centres in the UK and beyond.

Faraz Khan is managing director of Protocall One a leading contact centre consultancy and systems integrator specialising in multi-channel communications, workforce optimisation and decision management solutions. ProtoCall One is the UK's leading Genesys contact centre software integration player having completed more than 40 major Genesys implementations. The company assists contact centre operators from all business sectors to improve how they connect with their customers across multiple contact channels, increase customer loyalty and revenue, reduce operating costs and improve employee satisfaction. The company supports global customers from its offices in Buckinghamshire, UK and Sydney, Australia. For more information please go to www.pc-1.co.uk.


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