2001 or 2021: Are Contact Centres Keeping Up?

ProcedureFlow investigates the current state of customer expectations and contact centres.

Industry Overview

The contact centre industry in North America is home to over almost 61,000 contact centres, and is valued by Gartner as a 28 billion dollar annual industry. While the contact centre industry continues to thrive, the demand for better customer service increases with it.

We know customers’ expectations are only getting higher. In 2019 alone, 88% of customer service professionals agreed that their customers’ demands have grown faster than in the previous years. On top of that, customers are more eager now than ever to share their positive and negative customer service experiences with their friends and family.

As the industry continues to develop, customer opinions and their word of mouth are having a bigger impact on the day-to-day operations of contact centres. However, are contact centres keeping up?

Agents need to be on the top of their game and delivering the best customer service possible. In order to do that, they need to have the right tools at their disposal.

Today, we examine the needs of a modern contact centre, and determine if they’re adequately supplying their agents with the customer service software they need to go above and beyond.

What a Contact Centre Needs in 2021

When hunting to fill the technology stack of a contact centre in previous years, it may have been pretty straightforward.

Agents would be set with the basics; headsets, call routing system, and maybe a CRM or knowledge base.

Now, it’s important to keep a few more things in mind:

• Does this solution help your agents put customers first? As previously mentioned, the pull customers have on the success of a contact centre is obvious. Agents need to be operating with a customer-centric focus and their technology should help them do that.
• Does it help make your daily operations more efficient? Efficiency is crucial for running a contact centre. Reducing costs while finding the best possible way to do something is what every director strives for.
• Does it enhance the life of your agents? As the backbone of your contact centre, the solutions at the hands of the agents need to be quick, easy to use, and reliable.

If your contact centre doesn’t have a solution that fits these questions, then it is likely not operating at its full potential, and may be struggling to keep up with the ever-growing demands of the industry.

The world around us is rapidly changing. Society affects the way we interact with technology, and the B2B tech used in organizations is changing as well. Out-of-touch software from the past 10 years just won’t cut it anymore.