Business Systems (UK) Ltd’s Scott Budding looks at major drivers of change that our industry should be getting ready for Digital transformation
Digital transformation extending right into the back office will be a hot topic for contact centres in 2020. Many organisations have spent a great deal of time and money trying to improve efficiency in the front office, but more are now realising that it’s time to start expanding out to the back office as well.
Blending
Blending has been discussed a lot during 2019 and the discussion will continue throughout 2020. The move to blended operations is supported by respected commentators such as Gartner, the latest authority to recommend that the front office mechanisms to improve consumer interactions, like customer loyalty programmes or feedback channels, should be more tightly integrated with the back office. Doing so can cut costs, while a more digital back office could simultaneously reduce a consumer engagement budget and improve the customer experience.
Automation moves to centre stage
More and more organisations are going to start to look at automation across the front and back office. There’s been too much of a focus on attempting to automate end to end processes. Now companies are thinking more about the benefits of being able to automate activities and individual steps within processes, rather than attempting to automate an entire workflow.
A lot of those bigger projects were failing because they were taking on too much and expectations were too high. Fortunately, the capabilities of the technology have become far stronger and more attractive, encouraging further take up in 2020. To underline this, RPA — Robotic Process Automation, a way to streamline repetitive back office processes using robotic software is the fastest growing segment in enterprise software, set to hit $1.3 billion by the end of 2019.
Employee well-being will be a line item
The other important trend in the Contact Centre is an emerging focus around well-being and empowering employees to have more of a say in when they’re being scheduled to work. There’s been a shift towards employees, allied with a belief that if we look after our staff, they in turn will look after our customers.
Contact Centres increasingly have dedicated roles for well-being, that we haven’t experienced before in our industry. The millennial demographic has very specific expectations from a career and there’s a rising desire that workplaces need to be flexible and when staff need to make changes to schedules or take time off they should be able to do this via an app.
Well-being is going to be a big focus for organisations in 2020, because they will be in danger of losing employees to other companies that do make workforce well-being a priority. In fact the majority of millennials are citing work-life balance as the key factor they consider when choosing a job. Thanks to social media and phenomena like the employer feedback and rating website ‘Glassdoor’, companies are under increasing pressure to ensure their policies and environments are attractive and flexible enough to attract and retain talent. So the industry will be on the lookout for ways to address the war for talent and creating a culture where happy and healthy employees are a priority.
Firms are going to be looking for technology to be able to support digitisation and blending and flexible workforce management moving forward, in 2020 and beyond — making the next 12 months look very interesting indeed.
Scott Budding is Workforce & Process Optimisation Manager at Business Systems (UK)
Business Systems (UK) Ltd is the UK’s largest and most established independent call recording specialist. Founded in 1988 to service the City’s financial institutions, the company has built an impressive reputation for implementing complex projects on time and counts among its clients institutions such as the Home Office, Capita, Eurotunnel, DEKRA, Hexagon and Equiniti.
For additional information on Business Systems view their Company Profile
