Contact Centre Roles Are Adapting to Market Needs

Hervé Leroux at Odigo explains how every year brings its share of changes and challenges for the customer service sector, 2024 is no different.

With ever-increasing customer demands, contact centres are having to adapt, not only in their methods but also in the way they recruit and train agents in a sector that employs over 4% of the UK working population.

With the growth of this market and an ever-expanding workforce, the role of contact centre employees also needs to evolve. Beyond the often-portrayed contact centre stereotypes lies a spectrum of highly skilled duties in an increasingly professional field.

Contact Centre Stereotypes

Consumer Perceptions of Contact Centres

The ECCCSE study carried out in collaboration with Odigo provides a valuable perspective on consumer perceptions of contact centres. According to the study Europeans as a whole, have a rather mixed perception of customer service.

Although contact centre customer satisfaction appears to have fallen, the perception of interactions with agents is notably more positive than for service in general.

This underscores endemic problems in the contact centre industry but also the value customers place on the skill and support offered by agent-led service.

Interestingly it is worth noting that the perception of customer service in general is more positive among young people (aged between 20 and 30). This may be explained by their greater ease in using digital channels and self-service tools.

The Role of Contact Centre Agents: Then and Now

Before 2018 call centres, and later contact centres, employed a large majority of young people looking for a job to pay the bills, or to fit around their studies. Being an agent was not seen as a profession and didn’t seem to offer any real long-term career opportunities.

After 2018 perception changed. Now a position as an agent can open the door to internal promotional or other roles within the contact centre industry, and requires a diverse skill set to excel:

• Organisational skills
• Verbal and written communication skills
• Soft skills
• Marketing knowledge

There are even schools specialising in contact centre training: the UK National Contact Centre Academy or a City & Guilds Contact Centre Operations qualification, for example.

The Workplace Learning report signed by LinkedIn in 2022 states that a large majority of employees aspire to good continuous training within the company. 94% of workers surveyed said they would stay with their company longer if it invested in training.

New Contact Centre Roles Minimise Gaps and Distribute Duties

Organisation and Typical Contact Centre Structure

Contact centres are built from the ground up around agents who receive calls, answer emails, chat on social networks and even video chat with customers.

Beyond these front-line interactions lies a whole operational ecosystem:

• Supervision
• Quality monitoring and performance management
• Workforce management and resource planning
• Operational management and optimisation
• Training/coaching and HR
• Contact centre ecosystem

New Skills to Meet New Needs

With increasing professionalism, higher training standards and advanced technology, contact centres have seen an opportunity to restructure the roles within their ecosystems to incorporate new duties and meet new challenges:

Technical and Technological Skills

With the arrival of digital channels and AI, contact centres are looking for people who are adept at new technologies and who understand how artificial intelligence-based tools work.

Communication Skills

The customer service market can be demanding and stressful. Agents with soft skills and strong interpersonal skills are more likely to meet customer expectations by expressing empathy in their interactions.

Marketing Skills

Companies are increasingly interested in profiles capable of taking on the role of brand ambassador. Agents must be able to deliver a coherent message that reflects the company’s image.

Expanding the Scope of Contact Centre Duties and Opportunities

As well as improving the quality of customer service, this new range of skills has paved the way for the creation of new roles that meet the current needs of contact centres:

Quality Manager

He or she is responsible for combining the data gathered from recordings of both voice and video conversations to identify process gaps. In this role features like screen recording are useful to analyse advisers’ skills.

Data Analyst

Contact centres collect a huge amount of data. Data Analysts analyse this data to draw conclusions and solutions to support processes and propose strategies to acquire new customers or retain existing customers.

Training Managers

To incorporate new contact centre duties and optimise the performance of agents filling these new roles, organisations need to create proactive training content. With the help of quality managers, training managers design teaching tools targeted at the company’s shortcomings.

Opening up career opportunities enriches teams and encourages talent retention which is good news for organisations!

Not only is it costly to recruit and train new agents, but the erosion of knowledge and experience in contact centres with high turnover will impact customer experience quality.

Roles Are Evolving with the Arrival of Contact Centre AI

Customer experience tech is changing contact centre roles and now new AI-driven features like agent support tools are changing the entire approach to providing quality service.

Traditional scripting is being replaced by dynamic AI analysis of interactions in real time to provide ‘next best action’ suggestions for agents.

Natural language understanding makes it easier not only to qualify and route customers accurately but also to detect contextual information.

Let’s take an example:

• A customer calls her home insurance company to report water damage in her garage.
• The agent starts the claims process workflow.
• The word “garage” is detected in real-time by speech analytics.
• An AI-generated next-step suggestion prompts the agent to ask the customer about car insurance and offer a quote.

AI can act as an intelligent coach, helping agents develop and take on new duties by providing in-call reminders, suggestions and tips.

This expands the ecosystem of support for agents: team leaders, managers, AI and a spectrum of supervisor tools like workforce management and quality monitoring. In this sense, agents really do become augmented agents.

Artificial intelligence supports this entire ecosystem, helping to keep a finger on the pulse of new customer expectations, tracking trends and increasing reactivity.