44
OPTuS FuTuRe OF BuSINeSS
Mature channels
continue to be relevant
in the digital future
q. Contact centres traditionally have many
owners within an organisation. how do you
envisage the contact centre of the future
smoothing these relationships and how
would an organisation decide who should
take prime responsibility for contact
centre assets?
A. Contact centres are more likely to have
a strategic mandate across the business
to support many operations that face the
customer. We are seeing the IT department
take accountability for the technology while
customer service is responsible for delivering it
using traditional channels. The CIO also plays
an important role in integration, to capture
multi-channel streams, storage, retrieval and
analytics. Marketing will also take the early
lead on new digital channels and in particular
social media. Customer service people in
contact centre management roles are now
more often reporting to someone in the
C-suite and possibly the CEO. Indeed, contact
centre managers see marketing as an internal
customer. This reflects the elevation of the
contact centre from a back-office cost centre
to strategically important, customer-facing
service centre.
q. In what ways can organisations interweave
their channels to blend the contact centre
experience for customers?
A. Many organisations are still learning how to
evolve their multi-channel interactions but
there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to do this.
Blending channels is a technical and cultural
or skills challenge. A contact may start in
one channel but then has be escalated, for
instance to a voice or video call, for higher-
value interactions depending on the needs
of the customer. The ability to glide between
channels to follow a customer’s needs is
critical to the success of a multi-channel
strategy. However, some organisations still
find it difficult to blend inbound and outbound
voice calls even before they consider asking
their agents to handle email or text responses.
You often find separate agents for each of
these roles, although some organisations are
starting to train their people across these
activities. There is also the need to have a
central database readily accessible with all
the relevant customer information. Once this
is well integrated, it is possible to view all the
channels, the volumes expected, the staff
required to cater for that need, the reporting
and the workforce management systems.
q. The research suggests financial services
customers are most fond of contact centres
– why do you think that is?
A. The banking and financial services industries
are at the cutting edge of contact centres for
several reasons. With the large volumes of
transactions they have much to gain from
investing in contact centre technologies.
Many tasks are efficiently and cost-effectively
handled in the contact centre that range
from commoditised, basic banking activities
to higher-value and complex interactions.
There is also a strong link between the
traditional shopfront, contact centres and
new channels. For instance, a customer in a
branch may have questions about a product
disclosure statement. Branch staff could raise
this with the contact centre over the phone
before deciding to bring in experts who can
handle this face to face with the customer
but remotely over a video call. This way, the
contact centre is the co-ordinating point that
finds the right resource at the right time to
help the customer with their decision.
InSIghT
TechNoloGy
q&A with Optus Business Centre of excellence for Contact Centres
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