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Smaller UK contact centres need to “evolve or fail”, according to one of the sector’s leading players. Manchester-based allldaypa, the leading contact centre for the SME industry, reports that businesses face a ‘perfect storm’ of market conditions that will cause the profit margins of smaller operators to be wiped out.

Reuben Singh, CEO of alldayPA and VC investments company Isher Capital warns that the industry will see costs rise by over £440 million when the minimum wage rise takes effect from 1st April this year.

Commenting further Singh says: “I support the increase in the minimum wage. Failing to prepare for it, however, means smaller UK-based call centres are now sleepwalking to disaster by not considering these additional costs, alongside the need to invest to modernize and evolve to future-proof their businesses.

Contact centres are being challenged to form new strategies to meet the evolving requirements of customers or face losing out to either off-shore or larger firms.Contact centres are being challenged to form new strategies to meet the evolving requirements of customers or face losing out to either off-shore or larger firms.

“The phone remains the most important communication tools for businesses, the rise of digital has only heightened the need for a professional, personal and proactive communication, which is so crucial for business partnerships. The digital age has meant the opportunities for strong growth in this industry lie in multi-channel services, incorporating functions such as web chat and social media interactions into already existing strategies. The budget needed for this modernisation and training to deliver these offerings to customers is significant.

“With depleting margins already hitting the smaller call centres, they are going to fall even further behind.”

For this reason, alldayPA backed by Isher Capital is seeking to make acquisitions, having assembled a fund around £20m to buy regional contact centres or related businesses, to drive managerial and back office efficiencies using its tried and tested operating strategy.

The group is aiming to drive revenue from nearly £30m to £100m. Created by a network of eight to 10 contact centres spread nationwide; safeguarding jobs and growing the headcount of the current portfolio of companies from 500 to 2,000.

Commenting on the plan, Singh says: “The aim of each acquisition will be to preserve local jobs, building a nationwide network of contact centres with the back-up and resources or a major player.  We will create the right blend of local identity with our best practice systems and training.”

With 4% of UK workers employed in the call centre industry. This storm is putting one million UK jobs in jeopardy “Our plans in the marketplace are fluid and we have not implemented any specific timelines for making the acquisitions. My family and I have been investing and running call centres for nearly 20 years, we believe in maintaining our family values as we continue to grow our family business nationwide.”

With 4% of UK workers employed in the call centre industry. This storm is putting one million UK jobs in jeopardy.  This is particularly acute for Scotland and the North East of England where as much as 6% of the working population relies on the sector.

Despite these pressures, Singh believes that there is a strong demand for more regional contact centres, making it critical that they overcome the need for lower margins and higher investments.

Singh says: “Local regional suppliers allow businesses to oversee operations and ensure customer service standards are being maintained throughout, increasing the connection and empathy they have with customers.”

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Avaya has recently announced advancements in delivering and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into contact centres to improve the customer experience...

Avaya Ava™, a new AI architecture including natural language processing, machine learning and innovative analytics, enables effortless customer engagement through social media and messaging platforms.

Avaya Ava is a cloud, messaging-agnostic solution that offers new AI capabilities for social messaging integration and automation of digital interactions. Avaya Ava was originally introduced as part of Avaya’s online support community, helping customers and partners get their questions answered about Avaya solutions without human intervention. Ava has now evolved to include AI capabilities, complementing Avaya’s Customer Experience portfolio and is the ideal solution for any contact centre to modernise their infrastructure with AI.

When handing off to agents, Ava transfers the full context of the upfront automated experience, eliminating the need for customers to repeat information and steps already taken.Avaya Ava can engage with customers using social media, chat and messaging channels, and provide immediate self-service support as well as deliver the customer to agent-based customer care.  When handing off to agents, Ava transfers the full context of the upfront automated experience, eliminating the need for customers to repeat information and steps already taken.

Capable of AI mining via multi-lingual, natural language identification, contextual and sentiment analysis, Avaya Ava extends scale and efficiency to customer care operations. Ava can support 34 languages and Facebook, Twitter, WeChat and LINE, with more to be added as the solution evolves. The open API approach enables integration with third-party AI solutions from the Avaya A.I.Connect initiative.

The announcement of Avaya Ava comes on the heels of Avaya’s announcement of a definitive agreement to acquire Spoken, a leading innovator in Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions for enterprise customers and a provider of transformative real-time customer experience management applications built on conversational artificial intelligence. Spoken’s specialised agent quality software applications and services, as well as IntelligentWire solutions, use artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies on live voice conversations to reduce after-call work, drive more intelligent responses and gain deeper insight into customer sentiment and experience.

Avaya also announced today an expansion of the A.I.Connect initiative with three new members, and new solutions and services focused on the user experience, including Avaya Equinox Experience and the Avaya Desktop Experience.

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Research reveals that one third of organisations are challenged with gaps in skills, yet only 5% will increase their training to meet the changing customer demands in the future whilst 60% stated a future adviser should be able to handle complex interactions, yet only 11% stated advisers should have decision making skills...

Based on new research [1], UK customers are likely to find themselves dealing with contact centre agents who are untrained to service with their requests.  The research, commissioned by outsourced contact centre specialists Kura in partnership with the CCA (Contact Centre Association), set out to understand where businesses were positioned today and their ambitions for the future.

Responses from across 74 organisations were gathered to reveal current challenges, barriers to improvement and predictions for the future of the contact centre agent.

Although a third of organisations surveyed recognised that they have a skills gap with staff not fully equipped to answer the needs of their customers, only five per cent have committed to increasing their training budgets to address this.

“Whilst many organisations look to broaden their multi-channel offering, this places an added strain on agents who are then dealing with a greater number of channels.” said Brian Bannatyne, Kura’s Chief Executive. “While simple queries can be resolved through self-service offerings, more complex interactions across multiple channels would need to be handled by a well-trained agent.  If this interaction is dealt with poorly, it could have a serious impact on the customer relationship and future business prospects.”

 

Interestingly, according to the survey, the two skills most desired in contact centre agents of the future are the ability to handle multi-channel interactions (76%) and a high level of training to service complex interactions (59%) highlighting the increasing demands on contact centre agents.  This is supported by the fact that two-fifths of respondents believe that the primary purpose of today’s contact centre is to improve service by handling more complex requests.

“Based on the results of this study, most would agree that the days of the transactional contact centre are limited yet many are delaying the investment in agents that will be required to adequately service the customer of tomorrow.” added Brian Bannatyne.

“Not addressing this training deficit now will only cause greater frustration for agents and more problems down the line as the demands of the average customer continue to evolve.  At Kura, we do things differently, we’re not like other organisations, we’re building a unique culture that looks after people.  When you build a culture that looks after people, you grow people who look after customers.”

The key challenges identified by the contact centre professionals surveyed included ‘Increasing customer self-service’ (68%) and ‘Reducing customer effort’ (61%).

Participants in the research were from organisations in both the private and public sectors, including outsourcing organisations as well as in-house contact centres, responsible for different-sized operations.

 

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[1] These statistics are from new original research from CCA in partnership with KURA where 74 organisations shared their opinions on future service strategies – Oct, 2016.  The survey findings were analysed and interpreted in a desk research phase alongside contextual information from other sources including CCA’s research archive.

 

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Call centres staffed by operatives who are not able to make decisions rate considerably worse than call centres that can automate processes, research from [1] Inisoft reveals...

The poll of 2,000 UK adults overturns the received wisdom that automation is a bad thing for customer experience.

Top irritations for customers were:

1. Having to repeat your complaint to multiple people (58.40%)
2. Being placed on hold repeatedly during the call as staff checked policy (40.40%)
3. Feeling like the person you’re speaking to is reading from a script (32.00%)
4. Not feeling that the person you are speaking to has the authority to fix the problem (31.70%)
5. Feeling like the person you are speaking to is insincere (15.40%)

“All of the major customer bugbears are the sorts of experiences typical in a call to a poorly equipped call centre.” said Oonagh McBride, the Head of Inisoft.

 

“Ironically, call centres that lack proper automation tend to give customers the impression that they are talking to automatons.  A poorly equipped call centre will have staff floundering to find the answer to increasingly complex enquiries from customers, leading to delays, inconsistency and frustration.  When confronted with ill-prepared call centre staff, customers often express fury.”

The research also highlighted the importance of agent confidence when it comes to hearing customer problems and going off script if required.  In fact, 75% of those polled stated that receiving an apology was important.  For those aged 35-54, over 30% consider the apology to be ‘very important’.

Oonagh added: “The more technology that call centre operatives have at their disposal, the more they are able to do what they do best, which is to communicate naturally with customers in the sure knowledge that they have all the resources they need.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, only 6% of customers claim that their experience with contact centres is always good – or that there were no frustrations.

 

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1] Research carried out by Censuswide for Inisoft between 9th-11th November 2016.  Omnibus poll took a representative sample of 2,002 UK adults.

 

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xMatters, inc., a provider of communication-enabled business processes, have recently announced a major new release of one of the industry’s most advanced communications systems for managing, deploying and rapidly resolving IT incidents.

The xMatters On-Demand platform is award-winning technology that automates pinpointing and alerting for the individuals, IT teams and external service providers who need to work together to quickly rectify critical business disruptions.

The communications market is undergoing a seismic shift. After decades of declining revenue and stagnant innovation, a new market is ascendant. This market is being driven in part by cloud economics. IDC forecasts the cloud communications platforms market will grow from global revenue of $123.4 million in 2013 to reach $7.5 billion in 2018 at a 127.5% CAGR[1].

New IDC Vendor Spotlight Report

According to a new IDC Vendor Spotlight report by xMatters and titled “New Approaches to Optimising Business Operations With Cloud Communications,” cloud communications platforms are on a course to undermine telephony system equipment markets which will significantly devalue traditional carrier voice and messaging markets as well. These platforms are changing ideas about how customers, end users and subscribers can communicate with enterprises. A simpler, more flexible platform approach is fuelling a new convergence of communications and business processes. This makes it easy to blend real-time communications into business-critical workflows.

The report states a new cloud communications approach, layered with the flexibility of a software-defined architecture, solves traditional business communications problems by delivering personalisation, timeliness, multi-channel use and integration and automation.

For companies to assure their environment and business operations in the event of disruptions, a new communications approach that automates the directory and staff schedule to simplify stakeholder whereabouts, ensures multi-modal communications to reach stakeholders via preferred channels and integrates easily with other systems for coordinated efficient and agile operations is needed. To the extent that xMatters technology can address the challenges described in this paper, IDC believes the company is well positioned for success.

 

“In the event of an interruption to the business, which is inevitable at some point, companies need to keep ahead of the game to assure their business operations run smoothly and downtime is minimised. We’re pleased to offer the market a modern and intelligent cloud communications platform that automates the directory and staff schedule to ensure communications reach stakeholders via preferred channels and also integrates easily with other systems for coordinated efficient and agile operations,” said Troy McAlpin, CEO of xMatters. “IDC is aware of today’s communications challenges in the marketplace and we’re thrilled they recognise xMatters is well-positioned for success.”


New xMatters On-Demand ReleaseFeatures

Highlighted new features and functionality for the latest xMatters On-Demand cloud release, available today, include:

Vastly Improved Scheduling: The new On-Call Scheduling module and associated functionality make it easier to automatically manage all facets of scheduling, such as schedule recurrences, holiday schedules, automated rotations and temporary replacements. The xMatters On-Demand technology also proactively reveals “hollow shifts” – those lacking on-call resources – and dynamically resolves rotations, temporary replacements and holiday schedules to immediately show on-call information.

Group Overview: The new Group Overview is the 'home page' for the assigned group. It allows users to quickly identify on-call gaps, to understand who is currently on call, the escalation process in place, identifies the group supervisors and also includes full team contact information.

Improved Calendaring: The new calendar function shows a complete view of team shifts and supports adding new shifts and changing existing ones with drag-and-drop interactions based on common calendaring tools, such as Outlook and Mac Calendar. Users can easily view the scheduled shifts for the week and click on them to see the team members scheduled on duty and their contact information, the escalation process in place for the shift and other key details.

Improved Roster: The redesigned, single view of resources can more easily pinpoint for team’s who is available and move them into shifts.

Enhanced Conferencing: Conference bridges remain an effective mechanism to mobilise multiple people for sharing information and deciding on action steps. The new On-Demand release includes a redesigned conferencing report, which makes it easier to identify all of the attendees on the call. Also, the conference administrator now has the ability to edit phone numbers to people’s names to ensure everyone is accounted for. This new ability makes for easier reporting after the incident has been closed.

Strengthened Mobility Capabilities: The new release also brings multi-login support, allowing those users that are responsible for different use cases or multiple xMatters environments to be able to log into all of them via their iOS device.

 

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mplsystems, the UK multi-channel contact technology specialist, believes that 2015 will be the year that truly configurable, mash-up powered Customer Engagement Centres start to set the customer contact technology agenda.

“For 2015 we’re expecting an increased focus on those solutions that allow service providers to model exactly the customer engagement approach they require, without having to force their business processes around needlessly complex, one-size-fits-all CRM models. Technologies that support this next generation model, particularly when it comes to taking advantage of digital channels, will play a key role in 2015’s best practice contact technology deployments,” commented Paul White, CEO, mplsystems.

mplsystems' five key Customer Engagement Centre Technology Indicators for 2015 are:

 

• Agent Desktops enable true Customer Engagement Centres – while 2014 saw greater integration between contact centre and CRM systems, organisations still need to go much further if they are to provide agents with truly intelligent Agent Desktops. 2015’s biggest challenge will involve organisations getting much closer to customers, leveraging more meaningful and context-sensitive information through smart Big Data mash-ups to provide agents with relevant insight into all of a customer’s interactions with a business –ensuring that agents no longer need to hand off interactions to other departments
• Embedding customer care into mobile apps – we’re already seeing dedicated mobile apps assume greater importance in service providers’ omnichannel strategies, however for 2015 customer service organisations will build on this by embedding direct contact capabilities such as webchat, callback and instant messaging – effectively offering a Virtual IVR capability for those digital customers frustrated with traditional contact channels
• Web chat on track to become the dominant channel – our recent webinar with BT’s Head of Customer Insight and Futures, Nicola Millard, referenced how webchat is set to become the dominant customer contact channel of the future. 2015 will see chat continue to grow in terms of channel representation, as it transitions from browser-based web chat as we know it, to live messaging via customer mobile apps
• Text Analytics ready to handle increased volume of incoming text messages – whether it’s messages from mobile apps, social media, web chat, email or Visual IVR channels, many contact centres are seriously concerned about how to manage dramatically escalating text-based messaging volumes as customers increasingly engage via digital channels. Some businesses are still seeing major backlogs – sometimes of up to 48 hours – particularly at busy times such as the countdown to Christmas. The latest multi-channel textual analytics solutions are poised to address this during 2015, enabling up to 60% of messages to be handled automatically and freeing significant amounts of agent time and allowing them to focus on more complex customer engagement issues
• Broadening out the Customer Engagement Centre – while refining the customer experience within the contact centre and digitally has undoubtedly helped to reduce customer effort, there are still significant gaps in the provision of integrated service. For 2015 we expect to see more organisations build out their joined-up customer service propositions to embrace other key touch-points including field service, logistics and delivery capabilities as well as in-store engagement in the retail sector particularly and showroom engagement

“2014 has again shown that traditional CRM and contact centre vendors struggle to deploy in months, or even years, what more flexible, cloud-enabled solutions providers such as mplsystems can deliver in days and weeks,” concluded mplsystems’ CEO Paul White.

“It’s this kind of disruptive technology – powered by the five innovations listed above – that will continue to shake up the traditional contact centre infrastructure market in 2015.”

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