8 things we learnt about the future of contact centers from our expert panel

In July 2024, we hosted our All Access: Future Contact Centers webinar series, bringing together contact center professionals and experts from around the world to discuss current and emerging contact center trends.

If you missed the series, don’t panic! We have pulled together some of the key points from each session in the article below.

Contact centers influencing decision making

Our opening panel saw CX Network’s editor-in-chief, Melanie Mingas, leading a discussion between Advisory Board members Joshua Tye, senior CX operations leader at Cash App and Vinay Parmar, founder of Dhruva Star.

Both speakers were keen to discuss the critical role that contact center data increasingly takes in decision-making throughout the organization.

Parmar said: "Ideas are coming out of the contact center into the organization from conversations that people are having with customers."

Tye followed up on this, adding that contact centers play a crucial role in representing the voice of the customer within the organization. "There's an immense amount of data that contact centers get access to across different channels, so, when quantifying how the contact center contributes to churn, upsell or cross-sell, there is a lot of opportunity there," he said.

Tye added that, while there is a lot of opportunity, quantifying the effect contact centers have on metrics such as churn is challenging.

The contact center as a pioneer of change

Sabina Onwuka, head of customer services at London Borough of Barking and Dagenham discussed how contact centers drive organizational change. Onwuka's goal is to ensure that the three contact centers she runs use the huge amounts of data they gather to propel proactive customer support and innovation in the wider organization.

To achieve this goal, Onwuka has set up regular "portfolio meetings" with other departments in the organization. These meetings act as a two-way exchange of information between the contact center and other departments, ensuring that the contact center remains up-to-date and can provide the best service to customers while the rest of the organization gains visibility into key issues facing customers, spurring innovation. "We are the pioneers of change," Onwuka said.

To analyze contact center data, Onwuka has implemented AI. This effort is particularly focused on repeat calls to identify common pain points in the customer journey. Onwuka said the contact centers are "using the tech to analyze those large chunks of data, breaking it down into insights, understanding the insights, and then going into the portfolio meetings to bring change".

How World Vision Canada uses AI in the contact center

Our next panel session featured Bob Benner, senior director of AI strategic sales at Talkdesk, in conversation with Trionne Phillips, director of operational excellence for World Vision Canada, and Connie Nasho, the organization’s manager of workforce.

Phillips and Nasho explained how they have implemented Talkdesk’s AI in their contact center to improve operations and efficiency.

Benner began by emphasizing that the goal of AI implementation is to generate impactful outcomes for customers and agents, allowing technology to handle routine tasks while humans focus on more meaningful engagements. He stated: "It's not about AI for the sake of AI. It's really to generate these more impactful outcomes... let the robots do robot work. Let the humans do human work."

Phillips echoed this, saying the Talkdesk chatbot that World Vision Canada implemented "freed our agents up so that they could handle the more meaningful conversations".

How AI can help meet customers’ evolving needs

Mike Egli, CX client principal - contact center, and Jim Payne, senior product marketing for product management at RingCentral, discussed how AI is pivotal in satisfying customer expectations as their demands evolve.

Self service is increasingly important for customers, Egli explained, stating "more than 60 percent of customers now prefer to have the option to self-service at their own leisure".

Payne agreed and noted that contact center managers face a significant challenge in this. "Customers are super demanding. They want fast answers. They want it now... Nobody is properly staffed or has the right tech to actually meet those needs," he said.

The good news is that AI can help. Payne explained that he thinks about AI in three buckets. The first is automation, such as digital self-service and chatbots, that can handle simpler tasks. The second is assistance, whereby AI can provide real-time support and information to agents and customers. The third is analytics, where AI can offer actionable insights through comprehensive data analytics and improved decision-making.

How Shell is using AI-powered chatbots to improve CSAT and ESAT

Pierluigi Bosco, global B2C CX lead - customer operations at Shell, joined us to explain how an AI-powered chatbot is supercharging Shell’s customer service, improving customer satisfaction (CSAT) and employee satisfaction (ESAT) scores.

In 2021, Shell identified key areas for improvement: CSAT, employee experience, and cost reduction. They started with information retrieval to deflect the number of inquiries reaching agents: "Any information which is available on our website... was automated to reduce agent workload."

Recognizing that the chatbot cannot handle all inquiries, Shell has trained the bot to "automatically escalate immediately to an agent for more urgent issues", as well as "anything which is more emotional... we need to be more empathic in the answer".

Bosco noted that Shell initially rolled out the chatbot in one market to stabilize it before a global rollout. The rollout has had a positive effect on CSAT and ESAT. 

How Bank-al-Etihad approaches customer feedback

Ledi Lapaj, director of CX at Bank-al-Etihad, spoke about her team’s approach to customer sentiment analysis and actioning their findings. Customer sentiment analysis allows the bank to anticipate customer queries and prepare accordingly. Lapaj said: "Knowing what the customers are calling and asking about, we can use this information to prepare."

Lapaj asserted that, when it comes to customer feedback and sentiment analysis, data diversity is critical: "The more we hear from different sources the more we're aware about what's going on with our customers." She gave examples of how customer sentiment analysis has uncovered key areas for CX improvement, such as making the loyalty program structure clearer and adjusting the amount and clarity of information provided to customers to avoid confusion.

Channel diversity and continuous improvement in the contact center

In Coveo’s session, Devin Poole, senior product marketing manager, echoed other speakers’ points about the contact center’s role in continuous improvement. Poole noted that, once AI has been implemented, contact center interactions fuel its improvement, underlining that "every click, every search, every input, every action that the customer has can be fed right back into your own retrieval platform to say what worked what didn't, so that the machine learning models are constantly getting smarter".

Part of maximizing the data that aids continuous improvement is channel diversity. Poole highlighted that "your customers are not channel-centric. Your customers are not using only one and one type of channel for everything".

How Big Bus Tours transitioned its contact center to focus on sales with generative AI

Our final session looked at Big Bus Tours’ impressive results following transitioning its customer service agents to sales people and featured Ollie Wildeman, customer satisfaction manager at Big Bus Tours and Anna Startseva, director of product marketing at Freshworks.

A key part of the transition involved implementing a virtual assistant for service deflections, with Wildeman explaining that "if you try and get in touch with Big Bus, firstly there will be a virtual assistant that will try and help you out. If it can't, then it will send you over to a live agent".

Currently, the virtual assistant is achieving an impressive 78 percent deflection rate. "Naturally, this gives the agents far more time to sell, so you don't have to reduce the size of the team. They'll just have more time to do the more interesting stuff," Wildeman noted.

"What generative AI provides is the ability of bots to be quickly and easily trained on any knowledge base or any PDF documents that you may have in your contact center."

Freshworks’ Feddy Co-pilot was implemented, which has also been successful. "Whereas before, if [an agent] did a chat, the chat itself might have an 11 minute resolution time, but attached to that would be another four minutes where they're trying to write notes, et cetera. With Freddy Co-pilot, it generates those notes for them, taking a bunch of the busy work out."

Startseva added: "What generative AI provides is the ability of bots to be quickly and easily trained on any knowledge base or any PDF documents that you may have in your contact center." She went on to say: "Now your agents can do more. They no longer have to do the busy work of responding to their mundane queries that a lot of people get today […] All that time is now available for your agents to do the harder work, creating better connection with your customers, and of course, upselling."

When asked how other business can make a similar transition, Wildeman advised developing a sales culture with "weekly incentives, sales flashes and leaderboards for friendly competition". He added: "Encourage wider discussion about sales alongside the discussions that you have with your agents day in, day out, about the customer service aspect of their jobs."