‘Delivering World Class Service With a Human Touch’ – UK National Contact Centre Conference 2018

Ann-Marie Stagg and the CCMA, held the UK National Contact Centre Conference 2018 at the British Library. The theme; Delivering World Class Service With a Human Touch.

The event sponsored by Genesys was an extremely well attended event. Free to CCMA members, the event is packed full of content ,with speakers having short sharp ‘no sales pitch’ 20 minute slots.

First up and he never ceases to be one of the most interesting speakers I regularly see, was Ben Page, CEO Ipsos Mori.  The insight in today’s world that Ben and his teams have access too through their global reach is fascinating.  Ben as usual, hits you with statistic after statistic and this year was no different, as we are apparently angrier than ever!

As we deal with more difficult and complex issues within customer operations Ben broke this down into 6 key things which might help, based on understanding our customers and what influences them:

1. Liquid expectations
2. Search for simplicity
3. From products to services
4. Content is king
5. Experience sharing economy
6. Uncertainty is the NEW NORMAL

Did you know that there are restaurants in Japan created purely to be instagramed.

Ben talked about customer perception, how Amazon and Apple have spoiled the customer but delivering a positive experience alone is not sufficient to increase brand favorability; imagine if your expectation of Ryanair is awful and you actually have an OK experience, you will come away potentially happy.  Yet if you stay at the Dorchester who’s rooms start at £800 per night, the slightest issues or speck of dust will leave you feeling underwhelmed, yet they will be exceeding beyond most other brands in every way.

Monzo Bank have grown from 20,000 to 1 million customers in two years, their customers feel they are part of an exclusive gang an although they are sharing huge amounts of data and information with them, they feel great about it and empowered to bank with them.

Customers are becoming increasingly intolerant of poor service.

Personalisation is reducing in popularity, the key is to develop a relationship led, rather than a transactional experience.

71% of us trust what others say on feedback sites.

Although FTSE 500 leaders rated themselves a 9 or 10 when it came to customer service, only 1/4 have a Chief Customer Officer and only 30% truly listened to customers.

Next up Martin Hill Wilson from Brainfood with Skills and knowledge requirements for the 2020 customer facing teams.

Martin further explored the relationship and emotional side of customer experience, we understand it at an enterprise level but how much of it is being done in the contact centre.

Understanding the Peak End Rule where our memory of past experience, good or bad, does not relate to the amount of positive vs negative factors but to the most extreme point and the end of the experience.  Converting negative to positive is key.

Many of our leaders don’t yet have a methodical approach, we listed to Voice of the Customer but don’t act.

Martin also shared what a future team structure might look like integrating agile product development teams with traditional operational contact centre teams.

Marije Gould, VP OF Marketing EMEA at Verint took us through their research of 38,000 customers and 18 countries.

Is the future of Customer Service about loyalty as loyalty is on the decline across all generations.

Whilst a good price and product are critical to drive buying, 80% believe that Customer Experience is a key factor in their decision to purchase.  Being ethical is another major factor, particularly with the 18-25 year old market.  If they do not trust a brand they won’t buy and 58% said they would not engage with a brand that had a data hack (survey pre Cambridge Analytica scandal).

Live chat is becoming a less popular channel and milennials and Gen Z like to talk to people too, with 76% wanting human contact. 63% are happy to talk to a bot so long as an escalation to  human is possible.

Bots are really good in rules based environments.  Take away the rules and humans need to deal with emotions and empathy.  A customer who experiences a good human experience, will be more loyal than a digital customer.

We moved on to four CCMA Case Studies from James Revell, General Manager Air France, Louise Locke, Site Director Booking.com Gina Wall, Director of Sales and Marketing Animal Friends and Steven Lee, Director of Business Operations EMEA at Lego and Bill Wilson Digital Channel Strategy Lead from Severn Trent Water.

James took us through an award winning home working programme.

The audience participated in Louise’s ‘Field of Flexibility’ exercise, where we were given a few minutes to think of nine different solutions to a problem. Louise and Booking.com have created further flexibility for their workforce which has led to significant impacts across their London site.

Gina transformed a silo’d operation to deliver a more personalised service at Animal Friends with significant uplifts in service and performance.

Steven also kept his audience entertained,  as we were asked to build our very own Lego duck (not sure ours was the best of the day!). Steven talked about how Lego constantly questioned and challenged how they can remain current and consistently reinvent their brand in a constantly changing world to remain one of the world’s favourite brands.

Bill shared his and Severn Trent’s digital journey,  with significant uplifts of engagement across social media.

We also heard from Ed Creasey, Director, Consulting NICE. Stuart Dorman, Chief Innovations Officer from Sabio, Clare Lomax Vice President Sales EMEA, TTEC and Martin Teasdale, Quality Solutions Director from BPA Quality.

Once again a day full of insightful interesting and humourous content.

Thank you to all the speakers and the team at the CCMA.

If you are interested to learn more about joining the CCMA go to: https://www.ccma.org.uk/membership/