{"id":9137,"date":"2020-04-15T14:04:56","date_gmt":"2020-04-15T13:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/?p=9137"},"modified":"2023-01-16T17:32:14","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T17:32:14","slug":"part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/","title":{"rendered":"Part 14: Contact Centre Series Final Thoughts \u2013 Roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ringcentral.com\/gb\/en\/contact-centre\/overview.html\">contact centre<\/a> industry is often misunderstood. It can even occasionally get taken for granted or maligned. When many people think of contact centres, they imagine the cold calls that interrupt their dinner. There\u2019s so much more to the businesses \u2013 and particularly the people \u2013 in the niche than that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hopefully, our series has opened your eyes to the nuances of the <\/span><a href=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/analytics-improve-contact-centre-performance\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">contact centre<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> industry. By taking a microscope to the field and speaking to experts, we\u2019ve tried to give you an insight that most people lack. That is unless they work as an agent or other member of the all-important contact centre staff.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To refresh your memory &#8211; or if you didn\u2019t stick with the entire series &#8211; let\u2019s recap some of the main takeaways. In essence, you can put the fascinating details we\u2019ve learnt into three categories:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">People<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Processes<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Technology<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><b>A People Business<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It wasn\u2019t long into our chats with industry pros that we learnt how they all felt about contact centre agents. Everybody we spoke to made the point that the contact centre niche is a people business. Without agents operating the phones or answering emails, centres don\u2019t have a service to offer to clients.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As well as being essential to the success of their employers, agents\u2019 <a href=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/work-from-home-jobs\/\">jobs<\/a> are also demanding. Contact centres expect high levels of service efficiency and quality. Those demands lead to two notable hallmarks of the niche. What those are, are high staff turnover and a laser-like focus on training.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s tough for contact centres to retain their workers. Employees come and go in the niche with more regularity than in most others. One vital challenge for managers, then, is to keep hold of their most talented team members. There is a range of ways that those in charge of businesses in the niche try to do so.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9138\" src=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-21-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"458\" srcset=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-21-3.jpg 1000w, \/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-21-3-300x137.jpg 300w, \/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-21-3-640x293.jpg 640w, \/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-21-3-768x352.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><b>Source: <\/b><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rencaigroup.com\/employee-engagement-pulse-survey-annual-survey-or-what-else\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rencai Group<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Training and team building are two interconnected methods. Agents who feel they\u2019re best equipped to do their job well are more likely to stick around. In the same vein, employees who are engaged with their firm and the team around them don\u2019t look elsewhere as often. That\u2019s alongside generally being more productive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many contact centres also seek to support a better work-life balance for their staff. Having a job that fits around their personal life is far more important to the modern workforce. Centres are increasingly looking to home and remote working to aid this. The evidence for this is in the rapid uptake of <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">cloud solutions<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> within the industry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Allowing agents to log on and work from anywhere is a win-win. The agents get the flexibility they crave. Centres boost staff retention and have more control over their <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">workforce management (WFM<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). That assists them in responding to changing customer demands. Speaking of which, a shift in consumer focus is a factor that shines through when you look at contact centre processes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Complex, Interconnected Processes<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As well as the primacy of people, our series unearthed other fascinating insights. We discovered, for example, the complex processes that combine as part of running a centre. The principle concern of centres is to deliver a superior <\/span><a href=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/definitive-guide-customer-experience\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">customer experience<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (CX). To do so, they must balance a diverse array of tasks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the fundamental requirements is to have enough human resources to meet customer demand. It\u2019s that element of centre operations that relies on forecasting and WFM. Managers must assess trends, make predictions, and best place the firm to respond to them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the frontline, too, modern agents now have a plethora of responsibilities. They must handle and manage a growing list of channels, systems, and platforms. That\u2019s alongside the more traditional jobs of answering or making phone calls. All this must get done with the ultimate CX remaining at the forefront of their minds. It\u2019s for that reason that contact centres are starting to look to tech to help support their workers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Ever-Evolving Tech<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Digital transformation is taking hold in many fields. The contact centre niche is very much an early adopter when it comes to new solutions of varying types. Alongside cloud hosting, the industry is also looking definitively toward AI and automation. Use cases for those areas of tech development often get found in the contact centre field.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9139\" src=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-11-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"492\" srcset=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-11-3.jpg 1000w, \/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-11-3-300x148.jpg 300w, \/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-11-3-640x315.jpg 640w, \/gb\/en\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup-11-3-768x378.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><b>Source: <\/b><a href=\"https:\/\/www.grandviewresearch.com\/static\/img\/research\/us-robotic-process-automation-rpa-market.png\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Grand View Research<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Robotic Process Automation (RPA), for instance, is tailor-made for contact centres. More firms are finding the benefit of automating repetitive processes. That is, in short, that it unlocks the potential of their workers. Other AI \u2013 in the form of chatbots and the like \u2013 is getting similarly employed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s not only AI, either. Contact centres are also <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">investing in tech solutions<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to improve in many other ways. Interfaces and platforms to aid omnichannel support are prime examples. To deliver consistent CX across channels, centres need a unified and integrated system. The difficulty of such integration remains a principal hurdle to true omnichannel support.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s a mere whistle-stop tour of all the things we\u2019ve learnt in compiling this series. We hope you\u2019ve enjoyed our investigation into contact centres and found it useful. We\u2019d also like to thank the industry experts who gave their time to help us put it together.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The contact centre industry is often misunderstood. It can even occasionally get taken for granted or maligned. When many people think of contact centres, they imagine the cold calls that &hellip; <a href=\"\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Part 14: Contact Centre Series Final Thoughts \u2013 Roundup&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":18590,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"single-blog-series.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Part 14: Contact Centre Series Final Thoughts \u2013 Roundup | RingCentral UK Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"he contact centre industry is often misunderstood. It can even occasionally get taken for granted or maligned. 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When many people think of contact centr","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.ringcentral.com\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"RingCentral Team","Est. reading time":"4 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":":\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/"},"author":{"name":"RingCentral Team","@id":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/cc4f043d2b478862a8622c28b0ebd08c"},"headline":"Part 14: Contact Centre Series Final Thoughts \u2013 Roundup","datePublished":"2020-04-15T13:04:56+00:00","dateModified":"2023-01-16T17:32:14+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/"},"wordCount":884,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/#organization"},"articleSection":["Contact Centre"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":[":\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/","url":":\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-14-contact-centre-series-final-thoughts-roundup\/","name":"Part 14: Contact Centre Series Final Thoughts \u2013 Roundup | RingCentral UK Blog","isPartOf":{"@id":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/#website"},"datePublished":"2020-04-15T13:04:56+00:00","dateModified":"2023-01-16T17:32:14+00:00","description":"he contact centre industry is often misunderstood. 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