English language Visionary Marketing Podcasts

English language Visionary Marketing Podcasts


Covid-19 threatening contact centres with extinction

December 22, 2020

Contact centres might be threatened with extinction. Covid-19 changed digital experiences for businesses and customers to a point that the new normal for contact centres may be no contact centres at all. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Adrian Benic, VP Products at Infobip, a telecommunications and IT company with a Worldwide footprint and headquarters in Croatia and London. Adrian told me that, despite all the talking, building digital experiences wasn’t a reality. Yet, Covid-19 changed everything and the CRM digitisation process was considerably sped up.
Covid-19 threatening contact centres with extinction
Caption: Most businesses think they are building digital experiences for their customers but they aren’t, Adrian Benic told me. Covid-19 has changed that ball game radically. 
Despite all the prattle about digital transformation, not even mentioning the buzzword bingo regarding digital experiences, “what most businesses are really doing is building add-ons to existing experiences, add-ons that are by nature broken in terms of the journeys that their consumers are taking” Adrian told me.
Many businesses are behind in terms of building digital experiences
“What happens is that the online contact support team might work until five and after that consumers are stuck without help because everyone is getting ready to leave the office” he explained. 
Also, people that might be working the evening shift might not be available on the channel that consumers expect to find them on.
Support centres that are closed when consumers are available, deliver an awful digital experience
“It’s a sad reality” Adrian Benic went on. “When you think about it from the consumer standpoint, no one really wants to waste time on a website and talk to one’s telco support staff to upgrade one’s plan or any other chore.” 
Experiencing any form of inconvenience is already the beginning of the end of a good customer experience. 
“Such businesses aren’t really customer-centric. They pretend they are, but all they achieve is filling in their own pockets.” Adrian said. 
Harsh words, but the truth hurts, sometimes, as the saying goes. 
Changing behaviour imposes new tools
This changing behaviour has an impact on the kind of tools that people are using, and we are not just talking about plain-vanilla social media platforms. The aim is what one could call a messaging ecosystem. 
One needs to build the “new WhatsApp or Viber or WeChat for the customer relationship world” Adrian said. “When you think about it, there’s a whole ecosystem that could serve a consumer’s needs: from finding the service to talking to a business, and consuming and paying for it, everything could be found within the same ecosystem.”
Let’s talk about WeChat in China, for example, with which you can go to a grocery store, buy vegetables and fruits and pay with your mobile phone. “To those people, it’s as easy as selling apples or oranges,” Adrian said. But what about the rest of the world? “If such platforms are so successful in China, and attract so many consumers and generate a lot of business, why aren’t businesses adopting them at a much faster pace anywhere else?” He wondered.
Messages come from anywhere, one never knows in advance
The key is to ensure that the person at the receiving end doesn’t actually need to worry about where messages come from”
There are two areas to take care of. 

* One of those areas is the need to have access to all the data in a way that enables businesses to immediately understand the situation and take action as soon as the customer has contacted customer support 
* The other point is that the channel doesn’t really matter: “What one should only care about is the consumer and his/her needs.” Adrian said. 

So,